Guest Post On Women And Psychiatric Entrapment

The following is a reblog from Susan Kingsley Smith’s blog, Knowledge Is Power (KIP Central)

Like A Toad In A Pot

In Personal stories, Rants on January 25, 2013 at 2:24 pm

Musing today…

In 1992 I went to a “mental health professional” for “help” for my anger that after being sexually, physically, psychologically and emotionally abused the first 17 years of my life then married to one man who promised to kill me and the second who beat me regularly every 6-12 months to keep me in line for 10 years….while our families, friends and “church” endorsed his violence to cause me to be more “submissive” ie to meekly tolerate his dominance over my life….

I was angry and I could no longer contain it.

So I went for “help”.

Thinking I would work on my “issues” and learn how to do life differently. I knew I had come from a dysfunctional background. I thought maybe “counseling” would help so I went to the “church” for individual and “marriage” counseling where it was reinforced that the problem was not that my husband was abusing me but that I was not submissive enough and therefore since that was the natural state of woman – then something deeper must be wrong with me.

NOTE: At this time I was still functional and working – I saw private providers and paid my own way to my demise. This information is important because within about 6-8 months of starting this “treatment” I was non functional, could no longer work, lost my house and my life disintegrated before my eyes.

It would be 15 years before I realized what had happened to me.  

Instead, when the counselor at the church could not make me submit to my husband’s abuse and control and my anger continued to be an “issue” in our marriage, I was directed to a psychiatrist who prescribed huge quantities of Dexedrine. A potent stimulant drug of which the natural effects are to induce “depression”, anxiety/panic and psychosis – just like cocaine and other “street” amphetamines.

So of course an anti-depressant was added as was a benzodiazapine.

Within 18 months I’d gone from being a productive, feisty intelligent individual to a state of what I describe as “living death”.

My mind was gone. I no longer felt anything other than extreme hopelessness and powerlessness and the anti depressants natural effect is to induce mania…so a “mood stabilizer” was added to the mix and I was officially marked as “seriously mentally ill” i.e. the drugs had made me unstable and unpredictable. Yet when I asked to not take the drugs and try seeing if I stablized again – I was denied that request.

And since any time I missed a “dose” or after awhile on a drug and it stopped “working” – it was reinforced to me that this was my “illness” and I was deteriorating.

NOTE: it is extremely commonplace for any change or missed dosing to cause withdrawal symptoms that are said to be “illness” and the drugs need to change so often not because “illness” is getting worse but because our body has developed a drug tolerance. 

The cause of all of this?

I’d been told my anger was caused by a hidden disease that in the stress of dealing with the abuse – it suddenly “manifested”.

And because it was “doctors” telling me this and I was, after all, getting “worse” since seeing this quack – I accepted the idea that yes indeed I was “sick” and would need “care” and “treatment” read: therapy and drugs, for “life”. (Note that residual income and insurance payments are a nice perk for “providers” who are often unwittingly a part of this play. And sometimes they are in it just for the money even though they know there is no “chemical imbalance” other than what their drugs are causing. All in the guise of “helping”.)

I was “mentally ill”.

Yet – after 15 years of being trained, coerced and manipulated to:

• see myself as “sick”
• accept my “illness” as “fact”
• take my “meds” every day on time
• faithfully attend “therapy” and “doctor” appointments
• believe that I would never finish school
• believe I would and should never have my children back (I became so unfunctional and unstable that I surrendered my children)
• that I would never have a career
• that I would always live in poverty and on entitlements paid by the state (the bill to my states taxpayers for this type of incarceration is well over 2 million dollars and tha’ts just an estimate. The medical bill alone that I have records for is over 1M)

After 15 years and being forced into a cold turkey withdrawal of numerous chemicals by an egotistical psychiatrist for his own reasons…

I realized that it was the drugs that made me “sick”.

Thus – today the following rant: 

The goal for the mental health system is to gain control and compliance over their victims. (Public or private systems)

To create a dependence on “providers” and the drugs “for life” in order to assure societal control of the behavior of those they do not know how to help heal their “mental health” issues whom have sought their “help”.

The idea of “shared decision making” in the public (state funded) system and the other requirements that leave “providers” in control of “treatment”?

Think about it. Why would we, if we were not having our brains chemically altered, forgo our right to TRUE informed consent in order to make our own decisions?

This is how they keep us under control and in “compliance” – by training us from the get go that our job is to “comply” and their job is to “direct”. Those little crumbs they toss out in “shared decision making”?

#somethingtothinkaboutmaybe

I know all of this because I have listened to untold stories of others who have escaped this chemical lobotomy.  I have also experienced it first hand was victim to the farce “help” for 15 years and did not realize that I had been, as a toad in boiling water, led down a path where I ultimately gave up all control of my life and was completely isolated from society as I learned to first identify as “mentally ill” so therefore I was (justifiably) seen as too different to be a part of the bigger world. The whole “end stigma” is all about normalizing this type of control to make it easier to “screen” new inductees. They are now training “peers” to bring in those who may need “help”….as evidenced at this years “Alternatives” conference in Portland Oregon and last year in Orlando I sat in a meeting where youth were being targeted and Youth “Peers” were being taught how to bring other youth in for “help”.

Being told we are powerless to “feel better” and must take mind altering toxic poisons “for life” that are killing people 25 years early and contributing to poor health as we spiral downward non stop just waiting for the pain to end….

That is not a “life”.

That is our life being taken from us

Listen to Amy’s story and hear her views about how she fell into and got out of similar situation by clicking here.

DISCLAIMER: I do realize there are therapists and psychiatrists who are truly into helping with help that helps vs controls and abuses.

I also realize that some have been truly helped and have had pleasant experiences with therapists and doctors. I am not speaking to you here. (NOTE: in the end of my incarceration in the mh system I actually met a Social Worker Therapist who helped me learn how to heal my pain and “get a life” after extreme abuse that others had said I would never overcome and had forever “changed my brain”)

I am speaking to those who are imprisoned against their will as I was and who don’t even know it because of their dependence on their “providers” and addiction to these toxic drugs; and to those who love them.

I also realize that some will choose to use psychotropic drugs to cope and that’s fine – no problem with freedom of choice.

My issue lies with that we are not given true and accurate information to make that choice and are coerced into taking these drugs under false pretense’s and faulty/fake “science”.

You can read here about how I came to understand that those who are benefiting financially from this bio medical model are also the ones creating, testing and approving this paradigm and my awakening to the “paradigm” of the “genetic” bio medical model of care here.  The links to parts 1 and 2 are at the top of the page.