Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Modern Day “Thud” Experiment

By Patricia Lefave, monophrenic

If you psychiatrists put yourself in the role of the “schizophrenic” by assuming the label as your identity and then just being your “normal” self as part of a society that accepts your label as valid and as a “disease,” you might just reach the point[1] at which you recognize that your experiences of external reality and other people are PRECISELY what is being defined FOR you as “symptoms” of schizophrenia. You might also recognize that if enough pressure was applied, for long enough, by enough people, who were invalidating your concrete experience so that psychosis was the result[2] you might then also realize that your breakdown was being defined as a “psychotic episode” inside the parameters of a “disease process,” also defined as having nothing at all to do with external reality or other people.

You might then realize at this nexus of meaning, that your are actually trapped inside the tautology of your own labelling and controlling system and that is IS a closed system, from which there is no escape possible, until, or unless, you can manage to convince those who have you trapped that they are the ones who don't understand it, and that you, who are being defined by them as insane, or a mental defective, do understand it better than they do as the “experts” who hold you in their total power and control.

Keep in mind now that your “belief” that it is even possible for you to understand something that they don't, is ALSO already written in the big book of insanity (DSM) as one of your “symptoms” proving how right they are to see you as they do.

So tell me, what would YOU say or do, to change the position into which you have been forced as inherently “defective?” Got any ideas on how you might ever become seen or heard again as the person you actually are, and know yourself to be, even though no one else accepts it?

What feelings, I mean, “inappropriate affects”, do you think you might experience associated with being forced into such a position as this?

As a construct, do you think you might just perceive it as a 'circle” or perhaps as a “maze” out of which you can find no escape route?

Team Players
Being a “team player” does not always represent being “normal, superior or good” if the team you are on is the Team from Hell. “Reality” is not an abstraction in absolute terms. If you get shot in the chest in an alley one night, changing your “perception” of that event, or “deciding” that you don't have to “choose to be a victim” will not seal up that hole in your heart, no matter how committed you are to the idiotic idea you currently embrace that, “there is no reality; only perception.” Perhaps if you were less committed and got committed, your perceptions of our collective, shared reality would change significantly.
[1]  At the nexus of MEANING
[2]  A predictable effect of non stop pressure invalidation and psycho spiritual isolation

3 comments:

Duane Sherry said...

Patricia,

You wrote"

"Being a 'team player' does not always represent being 'normal, superior or good' if the team you are on is the Team from Hell."

My comment:

Wow!
I've never heard it put quite that way!

And, IMO, the conventional psychiatric model; the pharmacological approach; the current paradigm of 'care,' that insists in the 'biological, incurable, brain disease.'... The folks who continue to perpetuate this myth... The 'professionals' who lock people up without due process of law, drug other folks brains into oblivion, while continuing to call it 'treatment' could easily be considered the team from Hell!


Duane

Mark p.s.2 said...

Do you know where my money comes from? It comes from the Government and the medical diagnosis of severe illness. Without the reality of a monthly cheque, I would be cold and have an empty belly.

Let the priests do their preaching. Nothing can stop them.

Patricia said...

Mark.
Yes I know where the money comes from and also that the diagnosis is needed to get it. I also know the diagnosis traps people into inescapable situations, often for life and that without the financial support many would be forced into homelessness. This is however a situation that must not continue to be reproduced. One way to do that is to stop the labelling but also to change the outcome by allowing the need for support of this kind to disappear through attrition. I still say that anyone labelled with supposedly "intractable illnesses" should get the pension for life that these labels make necessary no matter WHAT the person is able to accomp-lish on their own after that. The system still needs to be accountable for what it says and does. I will continue to preach BACK to the preachers... because I can.