Now there’s a huge fucking trigger coming from an MHP…
I AM the one who is responsible for repairing EVERYTHING that has been the result of my childhood abuse and for all the years of damaging consequences from the “help” I received from doctors and nurses and therapists as well. The “help” has done more damage to me and to my life than say…oh…hmmm…GETTING BEATEN BY MY MOTHER, HAVING EXORCISMS PERFORMED UPON ME, BEING LOCKED IN MY BEDROOM ALL DAY LONG, BEING SEXUALLY ABUSED AND HEARING EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR MANY, MANY YEARS WHY THOSE THINGS WERE ALL MY FAULT, AND/OR FOR MY OWN GOOD AND THAT THEY SHOULD ALL BE FORGIVEN AND FORGOTTEN.
The “help” has been much more traumatic, and I have to repair that destruction too. Intentions, even good ones mean nothing in the larger picture, and I am not convinced that there were any helpful intentions within MOST of these people. I think it was business as usual with little or no thought to providing real help.
I’m the one that slept years of my life away and could hardly even walk up a staircase at 24 years old, because I was so drugged. I’m the one that fell down and hit my head more than once and had to go for a CT scan thinking I had some kind of brain tumor, only to be told that it was the medication, and it needed to be reduced. Except that my psychiatrist didn’t want to reduce anything, and for me to do so on my own would have meant going against his wishes…and uh…NOT TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR MY MENTAL HEALTH. Yeah, a typical psychiatric double-bind mindfuck.
It was up to me to find out that the atypical antipsychotics had caused my diabetes, because even after I developed it just months into taking the Risperdal, they did not and NEVER stopped prescribing those drugs for me. They knew too. They knew back then that those drugs can cause that. So, now it’s my responsibility to deal with that chronic disease and its consequences for the rest of my life. I very likely have PCOS as well from the Depakote I took for years, but there’s not a chance in hell that I’m going to a doctor for that unless I’m bleeding to death and maybe not even then either.
I’m the one that had to deal with the iatrogenic hallucinations that made me scared and the resultant hospitalizations when I would mention them. I was the one that had to ask for help and get it in the form of having to leave my home in handcuffs in front of my neighbors and ride in the ambulance or even in the back of a sheriff’s car LIKE A CRIMINAL just because I was “mentally ill”, because you never know what “the mentally ill” might do. And what did I get? Lockdown. Different drugs. More drugs, lectures about not taking responsibility when I couldn’t get out of bed to sit through groups and watch the same Duane Dyer, John Bradshaw and Zig Zigler videos that I’d seen on the 20 previous hospitalizations in a room that always smelled like shit and dirty feet with horny men staring at me and masturbating themselves. I was not helping myself by being “seclusive to my room”.
I couldn’t get through school because of the constant med changes and massive doses of drugs. I almost fell asleep at the wheel while driving more than once and nearly ran into someone head on out in the country on the way to school one day. That was just one incident of many, and thankfully no one was killed. If they had been, that would have been my responsibility too. I suppose the proper public safety response would be to disallow the mentally ill on sedating drugs to keep their driver’s licenses. Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s the best option. Staying awake in class was chore in itself, and I could hardly read my notes at times. But I managed to get all As anyway. There was nothing wrong with my brain except the chemicals being dumped into it. I was sad and angry and didn’t even know I was angry and mutilating myself out of rage, couldn’t have known, because the drugs disconnected that for me. It didn’t turn off the rage. It just kept me from seeing it as it leaked out everywhere else.
But it was all too painful. I was a goddamn pussy for letting them drug me and believing their lies and going back and going back…and that’s my responsibility now too. I’m a 35 year old college student with no work history, because I spent my days for much of the last 15+ years sleeping off the meds and trying to get out and stay out of hospitals. It wasn’t until I started to be able to go against their commands and do my own thing that I began to get well. That’s when I became a real problem for them. That’s when my life began to get better even if it got harder in so many ways. That’s also when I began to hear even more consistently that I wasn’t “taking responsibility”.
No, fucktards. I won’t take responsibility for your shitty educations and your stupid protocols and your ideas about how things should be done whether what you’ve decided is “therapeutic” in your minds is actually therapeutic or not. I dumped my psychology education, in large part, because I know how harmful your seemingly benign and “helpful” practices are, and they all start with the dogmatic and ill-informed education system that sits around applauding itself on its attention to the “evidence base”.
I’m sitting here today reading a journal article on a study of what works for patients in an inpatient treatment program for abuse survivors. Here the reader learns nothing about what works for patients really, but more about the perceptions of the researchers as they seem to have picked the bones for anything positive about this program. So, in this six week program with its stinky (but not specifically identified) DBT quick fix where the focus is NOT on trauma processing, but on dealing with “the present moment”, we should not be surprised to discover that empathy and processing emotions were the most valued aspect, or that loss of that support after a mere six weeks may have been a serious problem for many participants. Bitches need to take more responsibility and get themselves some better social support and stick with therapy…the needy, dependent whiners.
BUT, even after all this research we are still clueless, yes we are. Of course we’ve read Herman, and we’ve even read the real genius on trauma, Van der Kolk, so we know all about “the compulsion to repeat the trauma”, but FUCK INSIGHT in mental health treatment. We just want the Bitches to stop behaving badly, and we want it to happen in six weeks. So we’ll do a study and pick out the least emphasized aspects of the treatment program and call it a success with satisfied patients.
Where the fuck is Alice Miller when you need her?
But I digress. This is about therapy right NOW, right? Umm. Okay. Why can’t the past just die? because it created the present. That’s why. It shaped my life and who I am. I am the one and only person who is FORCED to take responsibility for the harm that has been done to me and to my life, not just from child abuse, but also by the mental health profession and individuals working in that profession. My first responsibility there has been to survive the help and take what I could use from it in order to GET MYSELF started on a healing path. I shouldn’t have to fight the “help” to do that, but I have had to repeatedly, and it’s exhausting. It’s also the only reason that I am still here, and that I am walking out of the mire that so many people with very similar circumstances have died and are going to die in while getting “helped”.
Objectification sucks. I know that first hand, but even when I am dealing with an individual MHP, I see all of them, which is too bad and unfair in some ways. I realize that. Then again, it’s the direct result of being objectified and treated accordingly in the mental health system. But my so-called “therapeutic relationships” also have almost NO generalizability to my casual relationships. If they did, I’d be totally fucked and NOT AT ALL capable of doing the rest of the things I am doing. I am full of rage, and it’s been building up for so long with nowhere to go. I won’t take responsibility for what others have done to me anymore, but I have so much to repair and so much time lost, and it is neverending. I’m doing the best that I can do with all of this. I don’t want to hear anyone’s excuses either. I rarely ever see anyone else take any responsibility for the wrong they do. There is no excuse to work in mental health and fuck with people’s lives in such huge ways and be soooo wrong about things while picking and choosing from controlled studies what a majority of people in one small selection of highly oppressed group have said is helpful to them. They know better than to bite the hands that “help” them. Who the fuck wants to be “untreatable”? Feast on scraps survivors. FEAST ON SCRAPS.
NO ONE ever listens to us, and we are talking. The very same deciders about what works for patients/clients/consumers are also the same deciders about what gets offered. They make the options, we can choose from those, or not choose…yeah, tell me it’s my fucking choice…tell me that again. Another mindfuck. Tell me some more about MY misperceptions. I need to hear that from a goddamn MHP.
Choices: Do you want to lie down (so we can strip your clothes off, tie you down for several hours and inject you with Haldol), or do we have to “help” you lie down?
