Toxic Peer Support

I want to clear up any confusion about the purpose of this blog. I am not a psychiatric peer, although I called myself one for many years. I never had any mental illness. My problem was that I failed to adjust to having been raped and battered by my family and I was too stupid to keep my mouth shut. I escaped from the mental hospital where I was incarcerated by the police when I tried to run away from home at age 16. I was labeled and drugged for protesting my torture. I am a rape victim, not a mental patient, not brain-diseased in any way.

I am a revolutionary, not a social worker.

I am not here to help anyone. I do not have the power to rescue anyone. What I am here to do is to is to challenge and dismantle the monster we created to rule our lives, the abstractions we call the patriarchal family, the government, the churches, the corporations, any group of gangsters that tries to impose it’s repression on the weak. I am here fighting Corporate Med and the Mental Corrections System. Right now for me the biggest threat is the psychiatric profession and the psychopharmaceutical-industrial complex. This is because I have been witnessing the decline and death of my friends and neighbors who have been fooled into believing they need to consume industrial behavior-control chemicals.

I almost died from being prescribed a dose of paxil, an ssri, that was 4 times the recommended dose. The doctors did not admit their mistake, the system has not accepted resonsibility for the harms it perpetrated against my body and my spirit. I have brain damage, a broken collar bone from a drug-induced fall, diabetes, cataracts, tardive dyskinesia in my back and shoulders, and all the collateral damage of being considered a mental case, when in fact I am a victim of chemical rape and torture. The irony is too much to bear. I left the rape and torture of my family only to be met with the same treatment from Mental Corrections agents, including the staff at Plainfield Death Center and Washington County Mental Health, Incorporated.

And when I was sick to death and acting weird and had lost a hundred pounds in a few weeks, my “peers” judged me and left me to die in the street when my strange behavior led to my being evicted from my apartment.

I don’t believe in the so-called psychiatric peer movement. My experience has been that people who have been labeled are even more likely to betray you than mental health workers. We have all been harmed by the power-over-others mentality that drives this culture and often peers are just aching for an opportunity to lord it over those who are weaker than themselves. What’s even worse is that those who are drawn into the peer movement are mostly upper-middle class individuals with a sense of superiority and entitlement. I am willing to admit that I was one of those individuals. This is the draw and the arrogance of being a helper: believing that I had any answers for anyone else or that I had the power to relieve anyone’s suffering.

I have listed some resources here on this blog that I have found helpful for myself in my journey to heal from the grave injuries I sustained, first from my family and then from Corporate Med. There are resources on trauma recovery and self-advocacy because I had to find my own alternative sources of help and they can be found under the tabs at the top of the page.

DRUG HYPOCRISY

My friend, who had been drugged by the system for 30 years, just died of complications resulting from the toxins that Corporate Med dumped into his body. And yet, his “peers” are trying to say it was his own fault. He didn’t call for help. He smoked marijuana. Well, folks, he had drug-induced dementia, which is as they say, the perfect crime. He had no idea what was happening to him because his brain was shrinking from the neuroleptics he was prescribed. The people at the psychiatric peer center that he started 30 years ago left him to die alone. I was the last person to see him alive, standing in front of our apartment building, with urine streaming down his legs because lithium destroyed his kidneys.

It it just appalling to me that state-funded peer support groups are required to be “medication neutral” and that in order for me to be paid to work as a peer I am compellled to “support” a person’s “right” to ingest neurotoxic behavior-control chemicals that have been prescribed ny Corporate Med and The Mental Corrections System, but someone who smokes marijuana to control their symptoms can lose their job and even be turned over to the authorities. I call this Toxic Peer Support.

The truth is that all drugs are morally neutral and that our drugs laws are about the Corporate ownership of healthcare and profit for these gangsters and not about protecting us from evil drug-crazed villains. There are no “good” drugs that heal and “bad” drugs that kill. The problem is never the object or chemical or behavior that is addictive, it is the pain of the addict that is out of control. And I have no easy answers for that problem.

I have nothing to lose. I can speak my truth as I see it. I’m not trying to be popular, if anything I want to make people angry so that they snap out of their complacency. I am not trying to build a peer movement. I just don’t want to have to watch my friends die of medical neglect and malpractice.