15. The Psychiatric Connection
"Types of behavior that are 'bizarre', 'strange', or 'queer', or that violate cultural standards which have a strong emotional impact are usually labeled as symptoms of mental illness, and society feels impelled to take action in regard to such conduct. For example, a person who flagrantly violates sexual standards....calls for prompt attention. He is quickly categorized as mentally ill or bad. Other types of behavior which also indicate a maladjustment...[include] a person who is withdrawn and avoids relationships...[who] may be regarded as 'a little odd', but seldom recognized as being as 'sick' as he is...
All of the patients described above as 'bad', or 'odd' or social 'bores' are entitled to be called sick and derive the benefits of patienthood and medical care."
-- Arthur Morgan, M.D. / Mabel K. Johnson, R.N.
Mental Health and Mental Illness (textbook)1
It is fortunate that, during the years preceding full awareness and consciousness of what was going on, I was not so "entitled". I get squeamish thinking about what would have happened to me if, in the grip of anxieties and uncertainties due to exposure to sexist pressures, I had been locked in a building full of kind and professionally certain people informing me that I was sick and in need of psychiatric help.
Come right this way, we're just a little confused and disoriented, aren't we? It's going to be all right. Here you will learn how to adjust. Now, now, no one is out to get you, you just think they are. A little bit of confusion about your sex role has been noted, so we'll work on that. No, no, these ideas are not appropriate, they are part of your sickness. We will help you learn to fit in and participate in society as a normal person. Yes, yes, but it isn't realistic to talk about changing other people, you can only change yourself. Why are you so nervous? That's part of your sickness, not trusting us, but you have to fight that. We can't help you if you don't try to help yourself. I've talked with your doctor, and he says if you continue to make progress, you can have recreation privileges. He says you can have your shoestrings and your belt now. Do you want to tell us about it? No, now, I thought you understood that those ideas were wrong thinking. That's the sickness talking. Doctor, he isn't responding to therapy as well as we'd hoped. Yes, I think so, too. Come on now, the pill will make you feel better. You don't want a shot, now do you? That's the way...
* * *
Knowing and understanding and having it all come into focus was great, and it was with joy and enthusiasm that I began smiling when I felt like smiling, skipping up the sidewalk cheerfully certain that nothing was wrong with me.
I talked up a storm to everybody I met, naively expecting them to understand and either argue or see for themselves. Polite silences. Nervousness. Strangest damn thing!
I'll go into more depth, I decided, and proceded to use metaphors and allegories to illustrate. More silence! I began writing, xeroxing, and distributing little manifestos. Sexism is threatening the survival of the species. Big Brother likes Little Sister and fights with Big Sister, but Little Brother deserves a chair. There is a revolution afoot that is not fought with guns, but the Amazons don't know where their brothers are. Send by the spread of ideas. Send by Word Of Mouth Every Night. The moon ain't no moon pie; she don't bake in no oven; she basks in the light, see? LIttle Sister is playing with her We Love Love button. Big Brother is going back and forth with his Economy.
Hmm, I think they're scared, somehow. What are they worried about that I haven't thought of yet? Why are they so reluctant to tell me what they think?
When I finally figured out that I wasn't making a bit of sense to them, I laughed at myself and realized communication was going to be rougher than I'd thought, and it wasn't the implications they were missing, but the nuts and bolts.
Only by now they thought they'd found as least one nut. Knowing as I did that there was nothing wrong with me, I was amused by the request to talk with the hospital psychiatrists and decided to go in long enough to satisfy everyone that I wasn't non compos mentis, just fired up. I signed in and thought I could clear it up and be back in time for supper. A lot I knew!
It took a month of on-the-spot training before the ringleader of the radical Mental Patients' Liberation Front was disruptive enough to get himself kicked out. Of course, I did come in with prior training: what is sexism but a giant psychological-torture institution, anyway?
How to Thoroughly Disrupt a Psychiatric Institution
(in case you get bored someday)
l. Accept your diagnosis, brag about it, express great joy at being that way and show pity for anyone who is "normal".
2. Talk with the other reluctant patients; discuss your therapy; listen to their real problems; share your feelings; point out that the staff is uptight, detached, unreasonable, manipulative, don't listen, won't share their feelings, and are therefore sick and need our help. Organize -call yourself "The Patient People".
3. Tell your therapists calmly that they might be right, but that you don't agree with them.
4. Point out that if each patient must take responsibility for his or her life, the goals and methods of therapy must be set by and evaluated by the patients.
5. Demand that the locks be changed so the outside world can be locked out, and that the keys be given to the patients.
6. Make buttons, posters, or plaques in "occupational therapy" that say "Continues to display Allan behavior" (patient's name in blank).
7. Seek out the rational and conscious staff members (if there are any to be found) and start making sense to them; show that your mind works and see if they will accept that you have a fundamental right to think your own thoughts; if so, promise to explain to them any behavior another staff member calls "inappropriate" or "psychotic".
8. Plan a group therapy revolution; on the chosen day, go around the circle psychoanalyzing the nurse; if the nurse protests, discuss the protestations without replying; never speak to the nurse, only to each other.
9. Talk about reward and punishment; discuss the extent to which you are willing to be directed by a carrotand- stick aproach; contrast with the idea of helping patients to understand and make changes from their own awareness and of their own volition; start itemizing and complaining about specific sets of bribes and threats used in therapy; bring ideas for non-manipulative mutual therapy to the attention of the more conscientious members of the staff. Stress the line of thought "I might be wrong, you might be wrong, we both listen with open mind." The objective is to polarize stafff members, which forces the institution to take you and your co-activists seriously. * * *
"A psychiatrist", said a psychologist friend of mine, "is a doctor trained in medicine, which he does not practice, practicing psychology, in which he is not trained."
It is true that psychiatrists become psychiatrists by following the rigid and depersonalizing premedical and medical programs, after which they spend more time in psychiatric specialization and internship. Like most doctors, psychiatrists tend to be very conventional, conservative, and accepting of the status quo as inherently correct. Their psychiatric training consists of ritual memorization of theoretical and unsubstantiated dogma and mechanical step-bystep approaches to dealing with people's problems as if they were sicknesses rooted in their brains. They are trained in observation, but not in empathy, and almost universally believe that clinical emotional detachment is essential to providing effective therapy.
Individual exceptions do exist, but most psychiatrists blend their own worship of normality and of conformity with textbook methods of reward-and-punishment behavior modification, and, since the patients are locked up helplessly at the whim and mercy of these doctors, whose medical training allows them to prescribe major tranquilizers such as Thorazine and order them administered without patient consent (in most states, they have the power to do this), these "therapists" are essentially in the business of brainwashing, pushing addictive and dangerous drugs, breaking the selfish id-like spirit of "difficult" patients, training them for obedience without understanding, and teaching them that someone else can tell them what to think, how to feel, how to act, and, finally, who to be.
* * *
Once upon a time psychiatric therapists worked with the concept that it was the events of people's lives that caused them to have problems, believing these problems to be emotional and subconsciously conceptual in nature. The idea was that people are susceptible to deep-level traumas, upsets that can leave them scared or confused in a way that prevents them from functioning well or being happy and secure.
With the passage of time, though, it was inevitable that patriarchal minds would grow tired of dealing with the fuzzy, unquantifiable realm of emotion, and so it came to pass that the chemical imbalance was invented, whereupon it grew to dominate psychiatric hospitals as the sole diagnostic theory.
"Look", says the field of psychiatry,"we've figured out depression and departures from reality. They aren't coping mechanisms for dealing with life's traumas after all, they aren't even related to the circumstances of a person's
life. No, they are the result and the symptom of physically abnormal conditions of the brain.
See? This schizophrenic who hears voices out of thin air telling her she's no good and should kill herself? Well, we know what causes that: chemical imbalances that cause her thinking to wander about in nonlinear patterns instead of following a smooth straight path that stays on subject. We even ran a brain scan on her the day after she pulled all her hair out and swallowed it in her padded cell, and guess what? It looks like the neurons in her brain may be firing in patterns different from that of normal people! It must be the schizophrenic pattern, all right. Electrical activity in places where the brain ought to be dark. Extra firing centers. She's lucky we can help her.
The chemicals in question? Oh, we may give her haldol, stelazine, mellaril, navane, you know, the basic major trank...uh...psychotropics. Yes, they cure her chemical imbalance. We'll try her on one, then another, or maybe a combination of two or three, until we find out which chemicals balance her best.
Normal brain levels of psychotropic chemicals? Oh, I see what you're asking...well, it doesn't literally work that way, I mean, we aren't literally replacing the chemicals which are missing, we haven't been able to isolate those, so we aren't even sure which ones they are, just as we don't know what the neuron firing patterns represent. But we can establish a relationship between behavioral abnormality and physical differences like oddities on the brain scan. And we can tell which psychotropic chemicals are balancing her, of course. When she got here, she laughed one minute and cried the next, bit all the skin off her knuckles, sang weird songs, and I told you what she did with her hair. Now she sits calmly in front of the TV set."
* * *
In childhood, the individual would develop an internally justified system of values simply by observing life, if allowed to do so. Most of us are discouraged from doing so.
We are indoctrinated into culturally defined belief systems at an age when we are quite capable of believing the claims to knowledge that adults make. We believe the ideas and definitions of reality and the codes of right and wrong we are taught, along with God, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the tooth fairy.
Our faith in Santa Claus and company may not last very long, but adults tend to insist more vehemently on the reality of God (some do, at any rate) and the culture's value systems. Eventually, children come to question almost everything their elders apparently believe, but some questions don't bring quick and easy answers, and as we enter adolescence, most of us suddenly develop a need for certainty.
Deprived of the security that might have come from a lifetime of assessing life and setting one's own values, we are immature for our age as we enter a stage where, according to strong social conditioning, you have to start being an adult. And adults, of course, have to understand the world (or wear a good pretentious mask to hide the fact that they still don't), because naivete is only okay for children.
The best pacifier known to the terrified seeking security is predictability, the establishment of something that will make the not-really-understood world cease to be a maelstrom where anything could happen, where all the standing room is untrustable. Yes. By all means, stability, uniformity, sameness. Arbitrary conformity. The Worship of Normality.
Thus, the unquestionably secure orthodox was separated from the chaos, and the orthodoxy they called clean, sanitary, sane, and the chaos of unorthodoxy they called unclean, unsanitary, insane.
And the orthodox they justified as unquestionable by persecuting anything and everything and everyone that purported to question it. Because these questioners were wrong. Or so they hoped. And believed. They didn't care to let proximity and comparison force them to find out.
And into the modern shiny psychiatric institution came the brave doctors who could cure the insane. The insane are terrified, said the wise doctors. They need security. They need a relatively stable, ordered environment full of routine and sameness, with a lot of emphasis on the ordinary activities of daily living. No scary reality-testing. Get them brushing their teeth, making their beds. I want the men to shave and the women to put on makeup. Orthodoxy and conformity will calm them and give them something to cling to.
But into the modern shiny psychiatric institution was tossed a stranger who had been handing out strange feminist manifestos, and he had just recently read an article about a group of psychiatric inmates calling themselves Mental Patients' Liberation Front, so when he deciced he wasn't getting what he'd come for, he decided to start a chapter right there in the hospital.
And the members of this new Mental Patients' Liberation Front wanted to talk about sex and politics and religion and love and suicide and life and death; and some of them wanted to sleep with each other while others wanted to sleep on the couches or on the floor, and they said, "So what if it it's emotionally intense, or unorderly, or different from normal? Does it hurt anything?" They complained about the godawful boredom, and some of the women put their makeup on their boyfriends while the men giggled, and the men shaved their eyebrows instead of their cheeks while the head nurse scowled from his plexiglass office.
In group therapy, the patients, now calling themselves the patient people, began discussing and redefining values. The nurses who had come to beam parentally and guide the therapy were told they could join in or listen patiently, but not to interfere impatiently with the patient people talking; after awhile, some of the nurses started talking, too.
But there were also a lot of very threatened and insecure people there who didn't like their reality tested like that, and they yelled, became violent, and insisted that personal contact was psychologically damaging to their patients' well-being. The patient people insisted otherwise, but the fearful ones lost their patience as rapidly as they were losing their patients, no matter how patient the patient people tried to be with them. Psychotropic tranquilizer drugs were ordered all around. It didn't look good for the patient people.
But some of the other therapists and an administrator or two began speaking up for the patient people, saying that these outspoken patients had an interesting set of ideas about reorganizing the care plan procedure of the institution. Some of them even went so far as to say that they didn't think the patient people were crazy at all.
Until one day a fiery MPLF radical or two found all personal possessions stacked in piles on the corridor floor after returning from weekend pass:
"You can't stay here any more. No, you can't talk with any of the other patients. Get your stuff off our floor and leave. If that stuff is still here tonight, it goes outside into the street."
* * *
The field of psychiatry uses the term "projection" for attributing to others aspects of yourself, denying that they are actually present in you, instead.
Psychiatry is very good at that. What could be more paranoid than fearing and labeling as "sick" anything that's different just because it's different? Psychiatry, unfortunately enough, is just a microcosm within the complete patriarchal society. The world is held together by nuts under tension.
* * *
The rare psychiatrists who are less sexist than the majority of society may accept that sexism is not a good thing, viewed in the abstract, yet will still generally think that the patient will be much better off by accepting the world as it is and conforming to it.
Sexism, they say, is a general and distant concern, an abstraction, and when a patient comes in emotionally volatile over sex roles, whether confused, angry, frightened, insecure, or securely vehement, they will insist on placing the focus on individual relationships, specific events, and certain situations that particularly affect the patient every time they occur. The implication is that the patient should learn ways of dealing with these that do not have that emotional effect, which occasionally is a good route to follow, yet invalidates the naturalness and correctness of the emotional response that says "something is not right here, change it, understand it, this is all wrong."
There are ways of dealing with a person's reactions to shooting someone so as to enable that person to shoot people without being bothered by it. Similarly, there are ways of dealing with a sexist world that primarily mean getting to the point you don't care, so it doesn't infuriate and frustrate you any more.
The unchangeability of the world seems to be a psychiatric "given", as if each patient were an island incapable of having any effect on the people who share their world, (which, if valid, invalidates the assumption that that people who exhibit behavior that is "'bizarre', 'strange', or 'queer' " can cause society to be "impelled to take action in regard to such conduct"). In no psychiatric institution that I've ever heard of are patients taught or encouraged to develop the communications skills for explaining eccentric thought or peculiar behavior so as to be best understood by the world when they reenter it, nor is the right to keep one's quirks and oddities easily won, even when the patient demonstrates a complete acceptance of the price that must be paid.
For feminists, this is and should be a major concern, since uncertainties and peculiarities of sexual identity, sex roles, sexual expression, and so forth constitute a major cause for psychiatric hospitalization. The sex role nonconformist, prior to becoming a feminist, may go through cycles of intense depression, frustration, confusion, anxiety, withdrawal, anger, hostility, "paranoia", and plain old loneliness. Every time I have been on a psychiatric ward in any capacity (I have worked on a psychiatric ward as a student nurse in addition to being a patient) I have seen and talked with tense "bitches" and "sissies" for whom comprehensive feminism might be the only truly useful therapy.
For awhile, I played with the theory that virtually all persons suffering from the problems called "mental illness" were sex role nonconformists, and therefore devoted much of my time to trying to organize MPLF-type mutual support groups based on that theory. However, in the course of doing so, I came to realize that the relationship was less direct and much more complicated than that. It would be more accurate to interpret "mental illness" as symptoms of the inhumanity of patriarchal society, and to blame that, in turn, on sexism; but I soon found that assuming all the men to be suffering from "sissy-against-the-male-role" identity problems, and the women to be dealing with the female version of that, was only getting in my way as I tried to empathize and listen.
Nevertheless, there are a heck of a lot of us to be found listed on the roster of patients and ex-patients of the psychiatric profession.
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