When Kim Wichera asked me to be on a panel co-sponsored by SoundsAbout Gallery and CTM Festival on the theme of sound and psychiatry, I immediately understood the potential of exploring the effects of modern psychiatry through this lens. Focusing on how I listened to and made sounds before and after psychiatry seemed a rich and poetic way to further understand its impact on my life.
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If there was ever a time to re-evaluate how we as a society deal with human suffering, I assure you, it is now. The particular nature of a pandemic’s mental health effects strains every false narrative and misguided practice of psychiatry. Especially the practice of medicalizing the very human reactions of severe depression and anxiety in response to isolation, deprivation, and suffering, as well as the claim that this response is indicative of chronic psychological disorders.
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I am a woman who fully identified with the label bipolar for almost 20 years and, according to psychiatry, rightfully earned it with four involuntary hospitalizations. Early on, I was given no other language besides brain disease and unbalanced chemistry with which to understand the altered states and despair I experienced. When I look back honestly on the very recent past, I see that I used the identity of bipolar like a brace around my hard-to-manage mind, to hold it still, to teach it where it could and could not go—where I could expect it to be at any given moment. Even what I could expect from myself and my life.
Read moreAs published in Mad in America
I am not immune to what I call weaponized empathy, which I see as the pure intention of compassion for another tainted with aggression around eradicating pain, pain that could be a source of growth for the sufferer if allowed to arise and pass away without force. I have shut down the suffering of those I love even as a survivor of the particularly lethal form of weaponized empathy that exists in psychiatry.
Read moreAs published on Mad in America
Of all the labels placed on me throughout my 20 years as a consumer in the psychiatric industry, psychiatric survivor feels the truest. At 21, I was labeled Bipolar and have been recovering from that diagnosis, and the treatment that came along with it, ever since. Encountering the forces we levy against emotional distress in our society up close, despite the trauma I suffered because of it, did eventually afford me something wonderful. It offered me the wisdom and compassion to know to ask myself this question when someone I love is in pain: Can I allow this suffering?
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