This is a reply to the entire thread that Lynne’s message generated, not just her message itself. This is written from the heart, not simply the brain.

In October of 1967 I had been staying for several weeks at the Sloane House YMCA in Manhattan (New York City). I had theoretically come there because of a three-month job, but I was in no shape to even pretend to be working. I was wandering the streets, standing and staring at things like fire hydrants and light poles for extended times, in horrible horrible psychic pain with reality totally closed around me like a tightly wrapped suffocating plastic bag, and no way out. After the first couple of weeks I had made the decision (one which, 35 years later, I still totally respect) to kill myself if there were no way out. I had struggled with this nightmare totally alone for nine months and I was now beginning to reach out.

That fateful Tuesday evening I was asked to leave by the head of security at Sloane House. They agreed to store part of my belongings and I took with me just a gym bag of clothes. I hadn’t done anything, I just acted in a way that made them very uncomfortable. Suddenly, I was out on the streets of New York without a place to stay.

Thursday morning, two days later, my father took me to see a psychiatrist who he knew in New Haven. Thursday evening, I was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Yale-New Haven hospital. For the next six months, this would be my home.

If I had not ended up there, if it hadn’t been for what happened with me in my time there, I would not have been alive another year, and I would not be present in any way with any of you now. That ward was the place where I turned around from a place worse than a living death to the beginnings of the path of life.

This was a “therapeutic community.” Some of the staff were helpful, some not. My psychiatrist in particular helped me a lot. But it was the patients who were the first line of support. None of them had any basis from which to understand or relate to the totally bizarre stuff that was specifically going on with me. But they all knew the experience of being in a place beyond of the bounds of the accepted experience of reality, of being in places that no one else respected or understood. They listened. It mattered. And that basis of shared experience mattered.

It was the patients, by and large, who could relate from the “inside.”

Two months later, two days after Christmas, one of those patients came in on a drug overdose. She and I got to know each other quickly, and two years later we married. 33 years later, we are still together.

Now, thirty-six years after I was admitted to the ward, I can pretty much “pass” for “normal.” But I’m not “cured.” I still struggle with the issues that brought me to that pass so long ago. Almost every day.

I had mixed feelings about what went on on the ward. It was basically a healing place, but a lot of how the staff related to patients seemed patronizing and demeaning. I basically stayed out of the way of this, but it bothered me. Years later, when I began to learn just how oppressive the psych system really is, I understood the oppression instantly.

So you see my own personal experience with psychiatry was not that bad. It literally saved my life. I had mixed feelings about the picture as a whole, but I was able to stay out of the way of the Big Nurses (of whom we had several), and I was able to brush off the patronizing attitudes that were directed to me.

I started taking psych drugs a week after landing on the ward, and continued for a couple of years. They neither helped me greatly nor harmed me greatly. In 1970 I stopped taking them, and haven’t taken them since.

I came out of this believing in involuntary commitment. Later, in 1972, after Su and I had moved to Kansas and she had begun to do local activism, I spent the better part of a year thinking about this issue in depth. Eventually I came to the conclusion that the authority to use involuntary commitment will inevitably lead to more harm than good. That continues to be the way I see it. This was before I came in touch with others who were passionately opposed to it.

Su in 1968 began a social club that was the first peer support group that I knew of. She started it with a social worker who she knew from her first hospitalization, but a year later he moved to another city and she was left in charge of it herself. After we moved to Kansas in 1971, the group was targeted as non-legitimate by the local Mental Health Association because it was patient-run .. no professionals or volunteers. The referrals we had been getting from the MH system dried up, and the remaining members were not strong enough to hold together and deal with this for our own good paternalism.

Su was in a rage over this for the better part of a year. The Breakthrough clubs for ex-patients in the Kansas City area were too oriented toward the MH system for us. We decided that rather than start another social club, we needed to work politically to change the conditions which had destroyed the first one. That, in early 1972, is how she and I were propelled into the beginnings of mental patient advocacy.

Those humble beginnings led Su and I into a key role in helping to bring forth the national ex-patient/anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. It was small, vocal, and radical, but by the time serious divisions basically split it into pieces in 1985, it had brought our issues to the attention of federal funders, had sparked the formation of what turned out to be two national organizations, and had sparked the formation of the so-called consumer/survivor movement of the latter 1980s that has persisted to this day.

What led me into this was my involvement in a Kansas group of ex-patients, professionals and citizens who were working toward passing legislation to limit involuntary commitment in Kansas. I became aware that the horror stories were simply par for the course, that abuse was endemic .. in short I became aware of just how lucky I had been at a truly vulnerable point in my life, and it sent chills through my spine. I spent several years working in the fight to stop the abuse of those who were in the position that I had been in.

Most of those in that original movement maintained that mental illness is simply a social construct legitimizing a system which serves to label, invalidate, and control those persons whose differences society cannot tolerate.

Some were totally against psychiatry. I was one of those who wanted to abolish involuntary psychiatry; I had no problem with psychiatry as a voluntary enterprise. I never took any issue with those who wanted to abolish psychiatry itself, because my perception was that if institutional psychiatry were deprived of the authority to use force on those it judged in need of help, that the whole rotten core of it would collapse.

Now for the first statement that will get me tarred and feathered off this list. I think the concept of mental illness is profoundly misleading because it reduces a multi-dimensional part of life that has both blessed and nightmarish dimensions, that deserves to be respected as such, to a disease needing to be ameliorated, if it can’t be cured, and reduces whole realms of experience to supposed mental or brain disorders. However. When I remember back to what I was experiencing in those days .. when I can get close enough to that consciousness to truly begin to remember .. the word illness totally makes sense .. it totally fits what I went through. Thoughts and feelings and obsessions that were not me had totally taken me over and there was nothing I could do to become free of them. It was like an outside force had entered and was affecting me in the very core of my being. I’m sure there was some awareness somewhere in my subconscious that I was feeding and giving life to this, but it didn’t matter .. nothing I could do would change it.

It is looking back on it that I see that the sensitivities which led me to this place are both a blessing and a curse.

So, when I really remember back, and sometimes even in my present experience, the word illness makes perfect sense.

In terms of medication. I have chosen (and I’ve reevaluated it several times) not to take psych drugs. I didn’t make that choice because of ideological fervor against drugs. I made it because it was my inner sense that they would interfere with what needed to happen inside for the long process of healing to work with me. In 1994, when I was in the most serious psychic trouble that I had been in since that period of the late ’60s, I made that choice once again in the face of a wife and a father who ganged up on me to try to convince me that I needed help (i.e. drugs). I later told Su, who had acted out of fear, that I knew that what I was going through was serious, that I had seen it coming, and that I needed to go through it as part of healing. She accepted it.

On the other hand. Su was one of the few people on the ward who was not put on drugs. Years and years later .. in 1993, she started taking them voluntarily. It was, ironically, her experience as director of the Kansas state consumer-run organization at the time, her experience in our dear movement, that pushed her into this. It ended up with the organization firing her and some of those who spearheaded this firing then attempting to destroy her reputation. A little more than 9 years afterward, she still has not fully recovered. But several months before that happened, after a particularly obnoxious meeting, she and I went to a restaurant afterward .. and she lost it. She wound herself up uncontrollably, she started screaming, she forcefully shoved a chair at me, and left creating a general scene. Many times in the past, I had gone after her, but this time, I decided I couldn’t take responsibility for her any more. She would have to take it for herself .. or not, whatever it would be. 15 minutes later, she returned .. totally sobered by my not having gone after her.

Several weeks later, she told me that a few days later she had gone to see a psychiatrist recommended by a friend, and that she had started to take an anti-depressant drug. It took her weeks before she told me that, because she felt ashamed, felt that I would look down on her for it. She never made it known among the movement, because she was afraid she would be regarded as a failure and a sellout. She gave me permission a couple of evenings ago to write about this here.

It became quite clear to me over the course of time that the drug was helping her. She still had her feelings, but they didn’t get so out of control. She still got upset, obsessed, and depressed, but she no longer wound it up and turned it against herself with the same ferocity, and she could deal with it more constructively. She went off the drug temporarily enough times (both on her own and on the doctor’s recommendation for a drug holiday) over the years so I could see the difference on a continuing basis. There were downsides as well, but the upsides outweighed them.

God only knows what would have happened to her after she got so brutally and abusively fired, if she hadn’t been taking the drug.

Ten years later, she is still on psych medicine, albeit a different one. She has been seriously depressed the last several months, and she is struggling to not just totally fold inside. She fortunately has been talking to me about this and not just totally turning her feelings against herself, which is a change for the better. It is both her sense and mine that without the drug she would crash .. would have crashed months ago.

So. Two persons here. Both long-time activists in this movement. Both totally against the medical model. Both of whose feelings about big pharma reflect those expressed on this list. One .. for individual reasons .. not taking drugs. One .. for individual reasons .. taking drugs. Respect for different paths. Willingness to go with what helps .. and not even think to sit in judgment.

I think that with all of us, this kind of respect has to be the foundation on which we build a real common ground.

Dennis