The Specimen Speaks in the First Person

By 'the whack-job' formerly known as Patricia

I know. Quite unusual isn't it for the resistant, non- compliant specimen under observation to be speaking in the first person like this. I must be living in the past when I really was a person and not a walking, talking defective, or disease process. Well, you know what "they" say about us. We don't like to 'let it go.'

I would like all of you "normal' people who have been observing me as a result of psychiatric reductionism to please notice something. With the exceptions of the compliant 'consumers,' there are few first person accounts of the dissatisfied 'consumer' made available to the public by psychiatry. There are very few first person evaluations of the SYSTEM that is 'helping' us. Do we really need to point out the reasons for that? Instead, you see third parties regularly acting as our 'interpreters' as if we had no voice of our own. I do not need an 'interpreter' to speak for me. I am not speaking in 'hidden' meaning.
Now, we need to present a more balanced overview which average Joe and Josephine can use to compare and contrast.

Psychiatry is not really a democratic institution; it is a dictatorship. That's my opinion as a thoroughly disgusted, non compliant service user. The fact that some take active measures to prevent me from offering my opinion on my own life and experience of psychiatry proves my point.
This lack of public opinion by the psychiatrized is NOT because we HAVE no opinion to give, or because we are all just too 'crazy' to string a sentence together; for we have much to say which is routinely suppressed. It's what we have to say which those who 'help' us do not want stated publicly. Too often they employ intimidation and coercive tactics as the means of silencing dissent.

In court cases it is very common for settlements in favour of the psychiatrized to come with a codicil attached: no PUBLIC discussion of the case. It is, in my opinion, this lack of disclosure that keeps the public buying what psychiatry as a whole is selling. Many of us consider it to be a pretty shoddy product and we are taking our right to express this reality, as end users, just 'as if' the right to free speech and dissenting opinion actually applied to US too, just 'as if' we were full citizens with equal rights in fact, and not just as an ideal. Some think that idea 'proves' we are living 'in a dream world.' Perhaps, for right now, they are more right about that than wrong.
The main reason you don't hear from us is because the dissenting opinion ITSELF is pathologized as the means of silencing it. How handy. To be ‘ungrateful’ for the brand of 'help' offered is to confirm for psychiatry, and more importantly for the public, that the 'help' is needed!

As with the dysfunctional patriarchy in the family homes that are run by the domination types, a lack of 'gratitude' for the boundary violating interference and abuse of power, is seen as a character flaw in the one being CONTROLLED but never in the one attempting to be the CONTROLLER.

This switch of basic identities between the controlled and the controller is very often the faulty premise which is used to create, complicate and sustain indefinitely and to DENY that the problem is what it IS. As I have often stated, “it is not anything complex that psychiatry and others do not understand. Rather it is the perfectly obvious that is overlooked in the first place, Indeed, the constant instruction in well entrenched dysfunctional relating is to 'overlook' being treated like crap by someone who represents the 'authority figure' who can never be faulted or held accountable for his or her own stinking thinking and boundary violating behaviours. Most of the world is now so well programmed by these ideas that they are no longer even noticed, let alone identified, as the irrational generalizations that they have always been.
“Authority figures” do not automatically represent truth, goodness, and the right way to live. We all need to question what we are told by people who want to control us because if we do NOT, once we are under their control and their power is secured, we may never get out from under that yoke of self righteous authoritarian oppression ever again. Despite watching the same kind of 'game' repeated over and over again, most of us never seem to learn from past mistakes. Maybe we all would, if we could first manage to 'let go' of the family romance.