Posted on by karin.jervert

The Song of Psychiatry: The Impact of Language

As a young woman, I believed the story I was told and internalized the language of the psychiatric system. The story it told, the song it sang, was that I was broken, that I had a disease, and that I had no other choice besides medication if I wanted to survive in the world I lived in—the white, patriarchal, imperialist, and commodity-obsessed culture I existed in. But the truth is that this story—a deceptive lullaby—put me so deep into the numbness of sleep, it nearly killed me.

These days, I find myself wondering what particular details of this story made it such a destructive force in my life? Some find this story helpful, even healing. So what made psychiatry’s attempt to “save me,” the language they used, very nearly destroy me instead?

Why did this story become the only thing standing between me and healing?

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Posted on by karin.jervert

What We Have Always Known but Psychiatry Forgot

When I came off my last medication, my psychiatrist said to me, “You will get sick again.”

Psychiatry has always been sure of one thing about me: that I would never recover from bipolar disorder. I was asked to accept that I was sick for life and to act accordingly. This meant any thoughts I had away from this “fact” should be seen as a symptom and dangerous thoughts to allow myself to believe. I was also told to acquiesce my healing and recovery to the power of psychiatry. I could have no power to heal myself because I was no doctor. I was not capable of understanding how to move towards health, not only because my judgement could not be trusted, but because the only answer to a “broken brain” was what only they claimed to understand fully—psychiatric drugs.

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Posted on by karin.jervert

Burning Down the House of Psychiatry During COVID

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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Posted on by karin.jervert

Surviving the Bipolar Label

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.

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Posted on by karin.jervert

De-Weaponizing Empathy

As 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.

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