My Own Case

By Patricia Lefave, Labeled, D.D.(P)

I don't kid myself that my own "case" is particularly unusual. I've been talking to labeled people for years now and I hear the same things from them, over and over again.

There are only two points about my own case that make it a bit different from that of most others. One difference is that I actually managed to find concrete proof that what I said was happening, which was judged as my paranoid delusions, was, in fact, true. It has made little difference though allow me to escape further "treatment" up to now.
The other difference is that I was not first psychically assaulted by one group (like family, co-workers etc.) and then disbelieved by psychiatry. I was psychologically assaulted by members of my workplace and then THE SAME PEOPLE denied the event, and proclaimed my complaints about THEM to be my paranoid delusions and hallucinated conversations. I was working in a psychiatric hospital as part of my job assignments with a health care agency. They kept calling me a "volunteer" despite several attempts by me to correct that perception. Perhaps, that is why they felt it was all right to force me out and cover up their own behaviour.

So, despite the fact that they KNEW what they caused, long before I broke down as a direct result of it, they chose to keep silent about their role in it , let it continue in public, and have even added to the damage to me for more than a decade since it all started.

When any of those involved, either directly or indirectly, see me now, they either ignore me or they put on that phony facade, pretending to innocence, often asking me in a tone usually reserved for use in telemarketing, "How are YOU doing"? This is done both by those who don't know I have told Homewood everything and also by those who KNOW that I know what they did!

Robert Whitaker and others are right about this. The hypocrisy which exists WITHIN the mental health system boggles the mind. A manufactured double standard of the definition of "mental illness" is alive and well, protected by those who are in control of the system itself.