Wanting to be crazy

Irit Shimrat and Persimmon Blackbridge yack

Irit: I've been asked to write a piece about the difference between the "consumer movement" and the "psychiatric survivor movement." I am antsy about this subject, because I no longer like the phrase "psychiatric survivor."

Persimmon: When did you first use that phrase?

Irit: There was a conference called "Our Turn" in Montreal in 1989. It was the first national conference of crazy people in Canada. Two people from the international psychiatric survivors' movement -- Judi Chamberlin from the US and Louise Pembroke from England -- spoke about the term "psychiatric survivor." They talked about how they'd been labelled "consumers of mental health care services." Louise said she'd never felt that she'd consumed psychiatric treatment; rather, it had almost consumed her. Judi said a lot of us never had a choice in what we were getting, or even if we wanted to get anything at all, so "consumer" hardly made sense. But the word "survivor" made sense because we'd all survived this horrible thing, psychiatry, and we should be proud.

At the time, I thought "psychiatric survivor" was a great thing to call myself. But I no longer think so.

The phrase is too long; it has too many syllables. It's not self-explanatory. If you say it to someone who isn't in the know, they have no idea what you're talking about.

Persimmon: It gives me this feeling of someone patting me on the head and saying, "Poor psychiatric survivor. Awwwww." It's supposed to be "survivor" as opposed to "victim." But the feeling it gives me is tied up with helplessness, and also with being slotted. I hate it when people use the word "survivor" without any qualifier: "Survivors have a really hard time with blah, blah, so we should all be careful not to upset survivors by doing blah, blah."

Irit: It puts us into a special category where we need special treatment. Which is exactly what I don't want. And if I call myself a psychiatric survivor, I'm defining who I am by saying, "Hey, everybody! Something terrible happened to me." And it does feel like I'm asking for pity. It doesn't quite work as a term of strength.

Persimmon: "Psychiatric inmate" is another long, clumsy term, but "inmate" is so direct in saying what happened.

Irit: What I like to call myself now is "lunatic" or "crazy person," because that has such a different flavour. "Inmate," again, is saying something terrible happened to me, and defining myself in a way that is necessarily negative.

Persimmon: And it's their term; it's defining yourself by what they did to you.

Irit: Exactly. And "crazy" is wide open. Everybody has heard the word crazy before. It doesn't make people go "Hunh?" the way "psychiatric survivor" or "consumer" does. And it's like being homosexual and proudly calling yourself "queer." You can take back the word, and say "to you that means something really bad, but not to me!" I love being crazy. I wouldn't trade being crazy for anything.

I really like the word "lunatic" too. Stewart Jamieson, a friend of mine in Whitehorse, Yukon, was one of the people who started a wonderful group there called the Second Opinion Society (SOS). He originally wanted to call the group "VOILA!" -- the Voluntarily Organized Independent Lunatics' Association. Ever since he told me that, I've wanted to belong to a group that had the word "lunatic" in its name.

Persimmon: My problem with the word "lunatic" is that whether it actually refers to someone who's been locked up in a psychiatric facility is very unclear. Because there are a lot of people who have been locked up who I would not say were crazy people. There are other people who haven't been locked up who are clearly crazy people. There are other people who would say, "Oh, yeah, I'm fucking crazy, man! I'm crazy!" People who would take that term on in a way that has nothing to do with an experience that puts you on the other side of a line that you don't even know exists until you discover yourself on the other side of it. It's vague in that way. I feel like I have been crazy, but I have not been an inmate. And like that makes a difference.

Irit: I think whether you've been "inside" or not is an important issue. And so is whether you've been labelled and drugged, regardless of whether you've been locked up.

Persimmon: It seems to me that if you're starting an organization and you don't make sure crazy people are in charge, the group can easily be co-opted. You have to behave in certain ways to get government money. You can end up with professionals running your group. It becomes a mini social service, with people who have been through the system receiving "services" from people who have not, and who see themselves in a helping role.

Irit: You're right, of course. Getting back to the term "psychiatric survivor" for a moment, I talked about this with Lanny Beckman, who started the Vancouver Mental Patients Association in 1970 and whom I admire enormously. To him, a survivor is someone who's been in a shipwreck, or in a concentration camp, where almost everyone died, or where there can be no question that the threat of death was imminent. True, some people have died of psychiatric treatment. But most mental patients are not in imminent danger of death. I think that's a good point.

Still, there's this international movement of people who call themselves psychiatric survivors. On a recently published list of groups around the world, SOS in Whitehorse was the only Canadian one. What Canada has is lots of "consumer" organizations.

I think the "consumer movement" was started by the government giving mental patients money, and naming us consumers. There's an ideology that's come out of the recent recognition of the failure of the mental health system, and the huge amount of money the system costs, and that ideology is "consumer participation." That patients should have a say in how the system is run, and in their own treatment.

This gives an appearance of democracy to an inherently undemocratic system. Suddenly, there's supposed to be a "partnership" between the people in white coats and the people in pyjamas.

Government reports that came out in the 1980s talked about partnership between the "key stakeholders" in mental health, these being the government, the professionals, families of consumers, and consumers -- usually listed in that order. As if each of those parties has the same interest in mental health.

Partnership says, "We're going to give you money, so stop complaining. We're going to give you some say in your treatment, so stop complaining." Because a lot of people have complained about the care they got in the mental health system, with very good reason. Quite a few people in the US have actually launched lawsuits, and the Canadian mental health industry doesn't want that to happen here.

"Partnership" says, "We're all in this together, so let's make it better."

Persimmon: I can entirely sympathize with someone who wants to make it a little better, knowing that "a little better" can be so wonderful in the midst of a whole bunch of shit. But then, there's still that whole bunch of shit there, after you've made that "little better."

Irit: Yeah. The mental health system is going to be around for a long, long time. And anything that makes people's lives in that system less painful is a good thing. But the consumer movement, like the mental health system, is based on the medical model of mental illness: the notion that misery and craziness are caused by defects in people's brains. Which is one of the most antipolitical ideas I've ever heard of, and which has never been scientifically proven, though almost everyone believes that it has been.

I feel that it's important to put energy into telling people about psychiatry -- about how the drugs can give you serious neurological diseases like tardive dyskinesia, and many other physical, emotional and mental problems. About how electroshock causes brain damage and memory loss. About how devastating it is to be told you have an incurable brain illness, when really you've just flipped out because of too much stress.

And it's equally important to figure out many other things that people can do instead of going to hospitals, taking those psychiatric drugs, and buying into the illness thing.

I think the psychiatric survivors' movement is primarily concerned with alternatives to psychiatry, and with exposing psychiatric abuse. It's not fair for me to talk about the consumer movement, because I've never been part of it, but I see it as being concerned with making psychiatry nicer and more comfortable; making sure everyone gets the right diagnosis and the right dose of drugs and so on.

Persimmon: Where can those two movements work together?

Irit: I want to bring in a third element here, which is the lunatics' liberation movement. Which doesn't exist yet in Canada, as far as I can tell. But here's what I would like it to be: a movement whose aim is to help people who are crazy, and like being crazy, be crazy in the best way possible. To promote the importance of craziness. I see lunatics' liberation as being about keeping people out of trouble with the system. But, more than that, it's about the importance of being different. It's about the expression of emotion, and of creativity. It's about recognizing that this is a crazy world, and there are good reasons for people going nuts.

Having said that, I think that where these three movements can cooperate is in sharing information, including information about madness.

Everyone talks about people getting "sick." Everybody talks about "biochemical imbalances in the brain" and how there's this disease and that disease, and you can get this and that drug for it. I want people to talk about what it's like to go crazy, and why we go crazy. Not only what we can do about it if we don't like it, but what we can do with it. Many artists and musicians and writers and thinkers are crazy. Lunatics have lots to be proud of.

I like the word "mad." But I don't want to use it, because of its other connotation, of anger. Anger is very important. If what happened to me in the loony bin hadn't made me furious, I'd probably be on the back ward of some mental hospital now, or going to a community mental health clinic, seeing a "care team" and getting a needle in the ass every two weeks.

I've never stopped being angry. And it's important that people find ways to express anger safely and effectively. But I don't want to be part of something whose main focus is rage. I want to focus on joy, if I dare say that. One of the main elements of my own craziness, until I got locked up, was joy. And one of the things that's happened to me in the course of my journey from being a mental patient to being a lunatic is that I have become a lot happier. And I think happiness gives people energy for doing good things.

Madness is about extremes of emotion. Extreme anger gets called schizophrenia or personality disorder, depending on how it's expressed. Extreme fear gets called paranoia; extreme sadness, depression; extreme joy, mania. We should be talking more about those extremes.

It's not that I want to deny or avoid or sugar-coat the bad stuff. I know that many crazy people suffer horribly. But I still think it's better to try and figure out your craziness and get through it in one piece than to squish it under a ton of drugs. And I want to emphasize what makes people feel good, because I think the primary alternative to psychiatry is helping people feel good. Which is easiest to do when you're feeling good yourself, and spreading it around.

Persimmon: When I've flipped out, it's been a really awful experience, but it's hard to separate the experience from how I get treated, and my desperate attempts to pass for normal. I'd like to know what the experience would be without all the fear and self-hatred that are so tightly interwoven with it. I'm not saying that if it weren't for all that, it would be a wonderful time. But it would be an entirely different time, I know. And if it was possible to talk about what was hard without constantly looking for the moment when someone's face closes off, and I've gone too far, and they're looking for the door, it would be a very different experience.

Irit: I want there to be places and times and situations where people can go mad. I want to go mad again, but not until it's safe.

Madness, as I said, is about emotion, and the expression of emotion. If you didn't express extreme emotion, you'd never get labelled sick or crazy. Expressing emotion is good for people, no matter what the emotion is. People have to let out what's inside them.

In other times and cultures, there has been a phenomenon of people going into different states, which in our society would be labelled "schizophrenia," and being seen as receiving gifts from the gods, or bearing an important message from another realm. They're seen as important and valued and special; as not less than, but more than the other, "sane" people around them.

The content of anyone's madness has value and meaning. Psychiatry devalues that content. Psychiatry says, "You want to save the world; that means you're schizophrenic, and you need Haldol." Lunatics' liberation says, "You want to save the world? Why? How?" I want to be able to talk with crazy people and respect what they're saying, and listen to them.

There's always some element of real life, even in people's craziest communications. When people think aliens are tapping their phone or that the CIA is following them around, that fear comes from somewhere real. They may now have, or may have had earlier in their lives, people talking about them behind their backs.

And anyone who's been psychiatrized has had their life totally controlled and monitored by other people. So it's not that weird that, when they go crazy again, they think someone's after them. Psychiatry talks about "following" people; keeping track of them to make sure they keep seeing their shrinks and stay medicated. Sure you're going to think you're being followed -- you are!

The whole experience of madness needs to be looked at and treated very differently. Let it be seen, if not as a communication from another dimension, as a lesson about how our society makes people feel. Let us learn from it, somehow.

Persimmon: That makes me think about how the world isn't just described by language and by our ideas about it. It's also ordered by language and by our ideas abut it: how to catalogue things; what's important in the world and what "doesn't exist," that we shouldn't see in the world. We're taught from a young age how to be in the world, and how to experience it. We're not taught how to experience the world while going crazy. It's defined as a bad, ugly,>negative situation.

When I was crazy I kept thinking, isn't there someone who knows about how to do this?

People keep telling you how to act in order to be normal again. It seems like all the language and ideas are aimed at trying to shut down the experience, so there's no one to tell you how to navigate the experience.

I went to the planetarium with my nephew and he told me, "If you start getting dizzy, just shut your eyes." Ah! A piece of practical information on how to deal with that feeling of being about to throw up!

Irit: I like the idea of a "trip guide" for lunatics. Isn't it interesting that our society disapproves of going crazy, and treats crazy people badly -- psychiatrizes and stigmatizes and incarcerates us and stifles the expression of our emotion, and forces us to take toxic drugs -- and yet, so many people drink alcohol or take acid or marijuana or cocaine or heroin, or Valium that they buy on the street. So many people take mood-altering, mind-altering substances on purpose to produce a state that, in many ways, is similar to madness.

Persimmon: Right. And then there's sex, speaking of altered states. Those things are all both stigmatized and greatly sought after.

Irit: Yes. People don't generally say, "I want to go crazy," but so many people say, "I want to feel different. I want to feel weird. I want to be a little bit out of control, but not too much." People take stuff all the time to make them less inhibited. Whereas craziness is the ultimate lack of inhibition, and psychiatry is a tool for enforcing inhibition. What a weird thing!

Persimmon: It's entirely weird.

Irit: So it's not so strange that I want to be crazy.

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Created: December 11, 1996
Last modified: May 2, 1997

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