Writing The Book About Psychiatric Slavery

I am established now in Hardwick, Heart of Vermont, and beginning to write the book about my capture, rape and 25 year enslavement by means of addictive chemicals. The book pictured at the right is by  Thomas Szasz, who also wrote The Myth of Mental Illness. If you click on the image, you will be taken to a site when you can dowmload a pdf of the book for free.  I had been thinking of using the term “psychiatric slavery” in the title of my book.

The working title of my book is – Chemical Rape: 25 Years As A Psychiatric Drug Whore In Big Pharma’s Stable.  This is more than a metaphor for what happened to me, since every person in the drug delivery system made a buck off of my chemical rape and degradation.

Another metaphor involves being sentenced to life in chemical prison for crimes against the invisible, paternalistic social fabric. I was complaining about being oppressed. I took one of my oppressors (the first in a long line of exploiters and rapists) to court and challenged not only his authority, but the entire system that supports the rape of one in four children before age 18.

In 1985 I was suing my parent for raping me for the first 16 years of my life. I had left my husband and had taken the kids and moved here to Vermont. I was not a good girl. I was stressed, scared, poor and having sleep problems related to PTSD flashbacks of the captivity and sex assaults of my youth. One day, during the time I was launching the lawsuit I brought my baby into the doctor for a check-up. The doctor stuck his finger in my back and I jumped. He diagnosed me on the spot with depression and coerced me into taking tricyclic antidepressants. He pressured me into taking them despite my concerns about toxicity and addiction, and the lack of any objective tests to show what imbalances, exactly, I happened to suffer from.

So on the basis of an unfounded theory and the prospect of permanent income for this doctor I was convicted (diagnosed) of deviance (depression) and sentenced to a lifetime of chemical probation (drugging) by the judge (doctor.) No jury of my peers, no trial, at all,  I just showed up looking suspiciously female and VOILA! The Medical Authorities issued me a death sentence.

From an essay by Lucy Johnstone:

(T)he single most damaging effect of psychiatric diagnosis  is loss of  meaning. By ruthlessly divesting experiences of their personal, social and cultural significance, diagnosis turns ‘people with problems’ into ‘patients with illnesses.’ Horrifying stories of trauma, abuse, discrimination and deprivation are sealed off behind a pseudo-medical label as the individual is launched on what is often a lifelong journey of disability, exclusion and despair.

In preparation for writing the book I have begun reading the journals and sketchbooks that I kept from the period of 1997 to the present. The journals show very clearly the decline that I suffered as a result of years of psychiatric assault with neurotoxins. And no-one would have ever realized that I was being systematically raped, poisoned and disabled if I had not been made so sick that finally I was able to wake up from this horrific nightmare and begin to detox. The more time passes since my last poisoning the clearer my head gets and the stronger my body becomes.

But, it’s bloody terrifying to revisit the time when I was under the influence, when my forebrain, the part of me that is most human, was so gummed up by neurotoxins that I could not read, could barely write or think critically. Certainly I could not question what the authorities were doing to me (and by extension, to my young children).

Here’s list of the drugs I was on in March 1998. I had to write them down in my journal because there were so many and I had to take them at 5 different times throughout the day:

6 mg  klonopin at bedtime
200 mg, clinoril (for muscle and joint rigidity) morning and night
5 mg. olanzapine (zyprexa), bedtime
.1 mg clonodine (a beta blocker to relax my drug-spazzed bladder muscles) morning
500 mg. depakote  at 2 pm
300 mg. neurontin (for bipolar that was “revealed” by prozac a couple years before)  3 X
prilosec for the stomach problems from clinoril, morning
thyroxine for the thyroid suppression by the psychoactive chemicals, morning
pyridium for constant pain in urination, morning

This is just one snapshot of the constantly changing panorama of pills that the eager professionals kept dumping down my throat.