also by Ms. McInnes:
Finding Dory Previn
Contact Ms. McInnes:
sasha@worldchat.com
Online Resources:
MAD Nation
DENDRON
Shocked!
Madness Network
Other Side Resources
No Forced Treatement
Talking Cures
related pages on
rondak.org:
web essayists
mental patients' rights index
site index
references
LEGAL & DISCLAIMER NOTICE: ©: 1999 / Will Brady //
I hope you’ve found this site interesting, even thought provoking.
Please don't write to me about the content of other peoples' sites linked
from here. On the other hand, please let me know of any inactive links.
Constructive comments, suggested links to add, are welcome.
webmaster: Will Brady
wbrady@operamail.com
updated: 16 jan 2000
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"And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow
happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And
there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to
make you patient and long suffering...[S]wallow two or three half-gramme
tablets and there you are." Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Welcome to the brave new millenium.
1999 was a very good year for the legal drug pushers and others who profit
from women's reality:
Are you shy? While you may have considered shyness to be just another
element of your personality, medical "science" has decided that it is the
expression of a chronic mental illness. In May, SmithKlineBeecham received
permission from the FDA to market Paxil as the cure.
Do you experience PMS? On November 3rd, an FDA advisory committee
unanimously voted to recommend approving Eli Lilly's Prozac for PMS -
despite the fact that a large percentage of the participants dropped out due
to the effects of the drug and that a placebo effect accounted for half of
the benefits. Hamilton, Ontario psychiatrist Meir Steiner, who supervised
the trials, guffawed to the press that "this is the first time the clinic
got flowers from husbands".
Have you been raped, battered, incested and as a result experience Post
Traumatic Stress Response? On December 7th, the FDA approved Pfizer's
Zoloft for 'Post Traumatic Stress Disorder'. (How long before
psychiatrists, with their prescription pads, will be a common sight in rape
crisis centres and battered women's shelters? Will these resources for
women survive at all in the brave new world of psychopharmacology?).
Ever feel anxious? Also in 1999, Pfizer received approval to market Effexor
for 'generalized anxiety', the garden-variety free-floating anxiety that has
plagued humanity since the beginning of time. And for those who thought
Valium was history, a "kinder, friendlier" version will be on the market
shortly, according to a group of Swiss scientists.
Depressed? On December 13th, the Surgeon General assured us, in his report
on Mental Health, that no other treatment has shown to be as effective for
depression as electrocution of the brain.
Shop too much? Lonely? Sad? Worried? In grief? Too happy? Do you FEEL?
"Take this," Says the Doctor, "you'll soon feel better." "They do 'feel'
better, because little by little, they cease to feel at all." Jeanette
Winterston, Art and Lies
the "medicalization" of human emotion
The normal responses of women to the violence and stresses we face under
patriarchy are being characterized as debilitating "mental illnesses" in
order to receive FDA approval for chemical treatment. This move to
pathologize and medicalize every human emotion and behaviour is succeeding
if one believes IMS America, which tracks the pharmaceutical companies. It
reports that in 1997, doctors in the US wrote 51 million prescriptions for
serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the most common antidepressant
family, which includes Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil. Sales of the top six SSRIs
topped $3.6 billion. Prozac, Eli Lilly's best-selling drug and the world's
top selling antidepressant, had sales of $690.2 million in one quarter
alone. Big business.
Insidious big business: two Eli Lilly staff are sitting on the 5 member
organizing committee of the "women and psychosis" conference being
developed, for March of this year, by the Centre for Addiction and Mental
Health in Toronto. Rumour has it the the CAMH will be calling it's new
training centre, The Eli Lilly Training Centre. An apt name, given the
millions of dollars in drug money being poured into it's coffers.
The MOOD FAIR, travelling to major Canadian centres, sponsored by the
Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments and funded, in large part
by the drug giants, includes in it's Symposiums a workshop, "Assessing and
treating depression: making the most of 15 minutes."
WOMEN'SPACE asked that I write about me, where I've been and what I've been
doing since my heady days as an uppity, radical feminist artist/activist in
London, Ontario. To write about 'me' is a challenge, because I lost 'me'
for a number of years. I stopped feeling, I stopped caring and for all
intents and purposes, I stopped being: I was
psychiatrized*.
Having been psychiatrized and a survivor of the experience, I hold close the
thousands of women in-patients on locked wards in psychiatric facilities or
in chemical straight-jackets across Canada who have not been as lucky as I,
to escape what some consider "help". I am them. Although white, middle
class with many privileges and a feminist long before I lost my grip, I am
one with these women. My experience of the system taught me that there is no
"other" under patriarchy, there is only "us".
I've huddled alone and very frightened in the locked ward of my own home,
longing for death to embrace me. I lived this out in a drug-induced
delirium and psychosis in a desperate attempt to convince myself that I
belonged somewhere, had worth, was loved and would be missed. I had no
idea, when I reached out for help, that this is where putting myself into
the hands of a psychiatrist would take me.
There is a long and difficult story about my personal breakdown, one not
much different from other women. A childhood full of misery, a devastating
personal trauma as an adult and a move to a small, isolated community where
social exclusion, scape-goating and alienation were the order of the day
from those I would, in most circumstances, have considered my community.
Some of us handle these challenges with ease but for others, myself
included, it's a different story. Scape-goating and social exclusion are
the fuel of madness in women. Compound this with a trauma history never
dealt with and no safe/confidential access to community supports, a
broken-hearted woman can fall over the edge of reality. I didn't die.
Instead, I committed social suicide.
Re-emerging from the fog of psychotropics was a slow process. What helped?
Re-connecting with my feelings/emotions, my voice and my mind and with the
people and activities that bring joy and light into my life. Re-discovering
my body through exercise, laughter, singing and dance, have all been key.
And books! For many years I had read nothing.
I continue to re-discover my Self, in community with other MadWomen- unruly,
disorderly and feminist. We are re-discovering our voices and together are
making sense of what happened to us when we put ourselves into the hands of
the mental health system. Technology has brought us together and provided
us with a powerful medium through which our community, UnrulyWomen, could be
developed. We are not all the same and the details of our lives are rich in
diversity. What we have in common is a commitment to mutual respect, to
validating our individual truths and to bringing the principles of women's
liberation to mental health policy. In many ways, UnrulyWomen is one
example of a re-birth of the Consciousness Raising groups of the 1960s and
1970s where our passionate politics were born.
Over a period of eighteen months I was under the "care" (how that word has
changed for me!) of a psychiatrist, was given a number of psychiatric
labels and prescribed a pharmacology of 36 brain-mind-mood altering drugs,
many of them to "counteract" the "side-effects" of another, some of which
will be with me for the rest of my life. She asked nothing about my
personal history, evidently having taken the '15 minute workshop'. When I
de-toxed from ALL the drugs and began to reclaim my Self, I wanted to
understand how a system that promised to help me "feel better", left me
feeling nothing at all. Research into mental health policy and practice has
engaged me for the past several years and has helped me to understand that,
as with all patriarchal institutions, greed and a pathological thirst for
power and control, is what the mental health system in today's world is all
about. If anyone is in need of forced treatment, sisters, is it not us.
Today, as I recover my Self, I am elated (Manic), shy, introverted and
reflective (Social Phobia), irritable and frustrated (PMS), whelmed and
stressed (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), sad and melancholic (Depression),
passionate, joyful, extroverted (Mania) and fearful (Anxiety Disorder). All
of these feelings and others are now so precious to me. I want these
feelings. I want them all. It's the "messiness" of my humanity and of
being alive that I choose and cherish, rather than the half-life offered by
brain, mind and heart- numbing legal drugs.
feminists spurn "madwomen"
The feminist movement has not yet embraced 'madwomen', homeless women, women
in psychiatric facilities - those among us most often considered "other".
This was brought home recently, when an organized plea to feminist
individuals, agencies and organizations across the country, to support
efforts to defeat legislative attempts to legalize forced mental health
treatment in Ontario, went largely ignored. To a situation, which clearly
threatens our human rights, a muted and often dismissive response was
received - 'this is not a feminist issue', 'how does this affect me?, 'I
support you privately but can't publicly, my job would be threatened', and
thundering silence from most others. Remember, sisters, our slogan "Keep
Your Laws Off My Body"? I'd add to this "AND Out of My Mind".
Today, I'm for ethical, responsive, choice oriented, label free mental
health supports. I also continue to hope for much more feminist thinking
and action in the context of the emotional lives of women, mental health
policy and practice. The label-oriented, isolating, drug-the-feelings
approach of Patriarchy will never replace the mental health, which came
through women working together in community, across differences. We must go
there again. On behalf of UnrulyWomen, I invite you to join us.
* psychiatrized = abused, violated, re-traumatized and used for profit
Suggested Reading:
Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric
Medications Peter R. Breggin, M.D. and David Cohen, Ph.D.
Perseus Books, 1999
Sasha Claire McInnes, an artist living and working in Hamilton, Ontario is
one of three co-owners of UnrulyWomen. She is developing a panel for IWD in
March and writing additional articles about issues touched on in this one.
She is also developing a website - disorderlywoman.org, a series of
tapestries based on her experiences of the mental health system, called "The
Pills Series: After You, Doctor Ingram" and an edited book about women and
mental health.
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