Schizophrenia awareness week

 

I'm a person who has been physically active all my life. I'm a person who is natural on the thin side. I'm a person who likes eating healthy foods. But I am also a person who got diagnosed schizophrenic and was subjected to forced 'medication' regimes over a 14 year period. At first I tried what the psychiatrists said would help me. When I found psychiatric drugs didn't help, rather harmed me to such an extent that I couldn't do physical exercise easily, lost 20 degrees of flexibility, lost my ability to balance, had dizzy spells, was constantly fatigued and even put on weight, I decided that the neuroleptics that the psychiatrists insisted I take were no good for me. I then went off them, recovered my ability to exercise, got back to my normal weight and also recovered my ability to think and read. I didn't receive help for trauma, so then I ended back in psychiatrists hands several more times, after being reported for saying strange things, forced to take their horrific debilitating chemicals again and again.

       Now when the MIFA, wants to blame those diagnosed schizophrenic for being lazy and not exercising, that makes me angry. MIFA's denial of what actually happened to me, a physically fit person, that was harmed by the drugs repeated effect every time I was forced to take them, is horrible. It's like having holocaust deniers in your face all the time, it's like misogynists who want to say things about women not being good at sport, about certain races of people being lazy, or stupid...

       Neuroleptics shorten people’s lives by around 25 years and psychiatrists have the power under my government to keep people, diagnosed with schizophrenia on these drugs forever.

       I was not a hard case. I was open to talking the first time I met a psychiatrist. I closed my mouth and went mute for a year after finding that talking only got me harmed. I could easily have recovered quickly if my government was funding such programs as Voice Dialoguing or Open Dialogue, or even good old person centred one on one art therapy. But my government doesn’t do that, my government forcefully drugs people with harmful chemicals that shorten lives by 25 years, making any years alive on those drugs emotionally and physically painful. They claim this is the ‘least restrictive measure’. They claim to ‘do no harm’. Absolute lies! Then they lie that the effects of the drugs are 'symptoms of schizophrenia'! Those kind of lies can really make a person already questioning reality due to other abuse, to wonder further more what is real and what is not.

       Be aware of propaganda from places like MIFA. I like the idea of physical exercise programs, but get it right, people’s lives are not shorten by voices and other unusual sensory experiences any more than altered states of consciousness. When a person is in a crisis they need to be helped, not battered by drugs and accusations of being a ‘sick mind.’ They need understanding and validation, housing, training, employment, friendly people, rather than damning and disabling psychiatrists and their cronies that tell really upsetting lies.

 Click here to purchase awareness button
 

Also, part 4 of a series on YouTube about how a person can get diagnosed with 'schizophrenia' when their identity and  sexuality is oppressed by their society. How forcing medications that don't help, rather harm, is not okay.
              It is not uncommon to hear voices of what society picks on you about, what society says you can't be, or do, what society says didn't happen. The struggle to be ourselves, when we also need to be what society expects of us, for our own safety and reasons of acceptance, can build into a crisis, where our dreams and nightmares make themselves heard while we are awake. It is the individual's attempt to be heard, as well as society's collective unrest emerging in that person. When society fears conflict, society tries to shut down people who tune into their psyche and speak about it. You have to have a lot of support to be able to gather your thoughts and help society understand that what is not accepted, what it is denied, could actually help society be more than it is.

 

 

Give people awareness. Send them a greeting card. Let them know how 'ripped off' you feel.

 

What's the awareness ribbon for psychiatric abuse?

 

And I don't just mean the findings of the Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council (VMIAC) revealing '45 per cent of women in the state's psychiatric hospitals have been sexually assaulted in their care.'

 

I mean what Jaana Satu Castella said at a recent talk, that the world will look back on the use of neuroleptics, in the same way people now find the idea of lobotomies horrific.

Jaana works with Open Dialogue techniques in Denmark and Finland. It makes sense to have conversation. It makes sense to understand, to validate and to listen. Humans are not fruit-flies (although David Anderson may think some humans are). And a crisis is often a response to loss, to alienation, to pressure, to change… That is not something that can be healed easily without the cooperation of society. It is so important to be aware of abuse. It is so important never to deny it. Because if your society denies your abuse, then they have aided and abetted the abuse and then not only obstructed justice but concealed facts and that makes  society an Accessory After the Fact. And when that all still remains hidden with no public awareness happening, that makes victims really, really angry.

Yes, I live in Australia, this isn't the place where children are sold off and married, or people are forced to work 2 days non-stop in factories... No, but it is a place where psychiatry abuses ritually, without a qualm.

If everyone else in the world thought neuroleptics were a good treatment for a person in crisis, who'd experienced significant loss, like I had when I was forced to take high doses of these drugs, it still wouldn't be okay. If everyone in the world said, yes neuroleptics really do work and they don't harm at all, it still wouldn't be okay to force them on people. If the world said things like that, which they don't, what happened to me would still not be okay. Psychiatrists don't take into account allergies to their 'medications' unless you are dying from them. They ignore patient discomforts with their treatments. They say like things like, 'you'll get used to it.' That, is really, really bad thinking. But it wasn't just one psychiatrist that said that to me, it was many, many psychiatrists who told me that. So, I can only conclude that they're trained to tell people to get used to things they're allergic to.

Ridiculous that psychiatrists can get away with this abuse, isn't it?

So, I suggest we stop psychiatric abuse. Be aware of what is happening in your country. Do not excuse it. Do not justify it. We are not fruit-flies, we can be communicated with.

And ask yourself... why after 202 years of psychiatric abuse, horrific torturous horrible things that have happen to people, who are not fruit-flies, or criminals, horrific things like lobotomies only last century and chemical and electro-shock lobotomies still happening... yet, psychiatric abuse does not have a ribbon for awareness. Why?

Where, where's our ribbon?

 

 

 

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.

 

Outrage in Australia!

OIA! publishing is seeking expressions of interest.
Submissions welcome.
Please send writing or pictures for the 2013 book about experiences  of psychiatrism, psychiatric abuse, or anything close to that theme.
Submissions for 2013 close June.
Send to your work to notachemicalimbalance at gmail dot com.
Payment, if your work is published in this book, at this stage, will be with a free copy of the book.

Like OIA! on facebook

We are not crazy. We are not mad. We are outraged! And we do not want to be subject matter in future science experiments conducted via psychiatry, just because we have unusual coping mechanisms for grief, crisis, trauma etc.

Psychiatrism

 

Defined as, 'The desire to become a psychiatrist, falsely label others as mentally ill, and then to treat them with harmful methods for a profit.'

link to Psychiatrism in the Urban Dictionary

 

and, if you want this image in a sticker, T, poster etc, go to my site at Redbubble

 

Also, some further reading on psychiatrism

And the torture psychiatry inflicts recognised by the UN:  'Deprivation of liberty on grounds of mental illness...that inflicts severe pain or suffering falls under the scope of the Convention against Torture.'


So,


Buy one and send it to the broadcaster
that has offended you!

For pillow-fight protests go to Zazzle

Transgenerational protest and social change

 

My mother’s big protest kabooie was sexism and so was my nana’s. Nana receiving half the wages of a male teacher, to feed her family with, really wasn’t okay; particularly as her husband died as a result of doing things in the war he didn’t want to do, like mowing down people with a tank. He relived the horror of doing such a disgusting act, blaming himself over and over for those he was ordered to kill… My mother’s experience involved severe trauma, so she hurled her protest around in a way that was upsetting to her children. But she didn’t do it all the time and she really didn’t have full control when society was still blaming her for the violence perpetuated against her. The mental health system at the time treated trauma, as it mostly still does, like the victim of crime has ‘problems.’ Court cases were discussed and I knew at quite a young age that a woman could be horrifically brutalised, but if she could be proven to be ‘loose,’ then she would not win a case against her attackers…

 

                My father, although he didn’t talk much, carried environmental and wartime conspiracies. His father had been pushed off a building in Cairo during WW2. My father had also worked on environmental studies where, any information that contravened what the mining companies wanted to do disappeared, and, a colleague leading the environmental project ‘suicided.’ My father was also stopped from teaching ‘the hothouse effect’ which is a precursor theory to ‘the greenhouse effect.’ He was a very silent man, my father. But he did show his anger on occasions, generally with a big fog-horn booming voice. So I somewhat felt his protest at a young age.

                I think most people carry some of the baggage from their parents and do try to make the changes to society happen, which their parents couldn’t. It kind of is the subliminal ‘job’ of the progeny to do that. But the progeny have to do it differently from the parents, if the parents really couldn’t handle the backlash of their times, together with the trauma they most likely suffered, it's no good parroting what they said.

Transgenerational protest… it’s not about genes, it’s about society, what society needs to do to become more humane, and, it’s definitely not a chemical imbalance and not something that should be said to be the ‘fault/ illness/ disease’ of the progeny, who understand the previous generation of protestors, and are trying to cope with that, and get their own needs met... lest we forget.
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click here to purchase T-shirt and browse other merchandise

How do you agitate the psychiatric martini glass?

I went to a poetry reading ready to agitate.

I wanted instigate change.

I wanted to rearrange. 

But I let the organisers know I was coming
 

And what I wanted to do,

So I thought they left me out

Of the big martini glass

That had all the names to be drawn

For the open mic night…

Until the MC asked if it was time

To put in ‘these two now?’

Meaning me and my lover, I suspected,

Who the organiser may well have thought

Would be in cahoots with me.

So I got put in the glass

And my name was drawn out

And I was given the microphone.

It was late and well after the precious

Psychiatrist had featured at the gig.

Couldn’t upset his

Vomiting out of derogation

By my reminder of his crimes.

Woah, he might get nervous

And muck up his performance.

Which was already full of muck

Because it was about his profession!

Him teaching people to communicate?

Him teaching people to listen more?

Did he want to listen to me

Or any other people abused by psychiatry

That have the ability to speak out?

Of course not. The smug smarmy

Bag of ugly went out to smoke

When I read my poem.

Couldn’t recite of course,

Because my brains have had a blast

Of nasty neuroleptics for fourteen years and that’s

Changed my natural knack of remembering lines.

I find it hard to live in a society

That cramps my voice

Yet allows psychiatry to speak out

Its horrible eugenics doctrine,

Its crimes I have known and felt for so long.

Don’t people know how offensive

The terms psychiatrists use are?

They hit me hard every time they’re uttered

With threat, judgment and trauma flashback fear.

Don’t people understand that these terms

Are used time and time again

To threaten, abuse and vilify?

I don’t mind what sort of nonsense

Someone wants to talk, be it even pseudo-science,

But if you use it to justify the crimes,

Of your profession and lie about

Benefits of your chemicals

On humans who tell you again and again

That they do not want to be harmed

By these substances, then, well then,

You’re one big bag of ugly muck

And if you can’t stand up on stage

After I have spoken, well then,

You’re a lot less than me,

Because I could stand on stage

And deliver after that bag of muck

Got up and did his derogatory drool,

His psychiatric statements that make racism

Seem like Pollyanna in a wheelchair.

Because we should all know racism is wrong,

We should shouldn’t we? We do. It’s policy,

It’s against the law to be racist.

But does everyone know psychiatry is equally,

Equally wrong, if not more so, because,

Psychiatry tortures on a daily basis

Every hour, every minute, every second,

In Australia, in Victoria, in Melbourne

And in many other parts of the world?

But we can’t call it torture,

Even though it is torturous,

Because there’s a loop-hole that says

This torture is medicine and it’s for the best,

To help and to care and besides,

Psychiatrists are doctors

And a doctor’s motto is to do no harm.

I’d like one day for that word, psychiatry,

That word to be spat out so hard against

Those who use those statements to harm.

I’d like to have it so that one day

If a person called you a damn psychiatrist

You’d understand they mean no compliment,

They’re telling you that you’ve been

Hideously slanderous and could be

Sent off the field for your words,

Bleeped off radio and television,

Called into court…

One day I see these things happening.

Until then it is my lover and I who are

Rudely left out of the big martini glass…

Only able to agitate when the night is old...

Or so it is I seem to think... as I sip a memory.

When there is no time to laboriously stir,

Apparently agitating a martini is the best way,

Rather than shaking it up and bruising the spirits,

Which I’ve probably done now! Ouch...

Got to be careful I what I think happens,

My lover says, it may not be as it seems,

That my accusations are considerably defamatory,

And that we were in the glass all the time

And the MC was talking about some other people

Whose names had been left out.

I slug that down and think: bitter eh? Bad taste!

I’m not much of a drinker anyway

And dash the rest down the sink.

Discrimination in the poetry scene?

Too rough, way too rough for poetry,

My lover makes far more sense...

Okay, okay, I may’ve been wrong

For thinking such stuff like that

In the past, that, yeah

That, but even back then when
I thought like that for a longer time period,
I never deserved to be

Tortured with painful chemicals for that.

Everyone makes mistakes,
Not all of them are as bizarre as mine,
But everyone makes mistakes.

Got to get my spirit levels right though

And not mistake eyes for ice

And community for carpentry tools

And drinks for balance,
Even though that's the symbols
Of the feelings mixed up in the martini.
But seriously, I've got to never make the mistake
Of saying something is when it isn't,
Like that psychiatrist did,
Or I am as bad as him
Repeating old lies about medication 
Being very effective and helpful
And people's thoughts making
Less sense than pseudo-science,

Making up disgusting bruised drinks

Because the words repeat and repeat,

‘Shaken, not stirred’ and meaning

Meaning something mean, some thing

Other than the order for the bar.

 

Something poetry hits with its farrier.



                       go to: Strengthen Our Voices 2013