I wanted to share some images and the artist statement from my recent show at a local coffee shop. Just took it down Tuesday.
Statement: The most important aspect of the Mad Pride Movement to me, as an artist, is remembering the humanity of grief, trauma, and suffering. Generations of wisdom around grieving have been shut down and silenced, the ways we used to hold one another in suffering have been forgotten.
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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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Feel like taking a musical journey of #survivingpsychiatry? If you have Apple Music, you can listen here. Or recreate the playlist on any of your favorite streaming services (ideally a service that respects and pays artists well – hard to come by in the streaming services.)
In this webinar, hosted by the National Empowerment Center, we will explore several conditions and intentions in art-making practice which can create spaces that support healing for ourselves and for those in emotional crisis. We will talk about art-making as a container for suffering, anger, altered states, and other experiences; how to facilitate flow within this space; and what obstacles can appear like fear, judgment, shame, and paralysis. We will talk also about lowering stakes in self-expression by encouraging and incorporating play and mistakes as powerful learning experiences. I will offer tools and ideas that together use art-making practices and concepts as a framework for a philosophy of care and compassion in the presence of our own and other’s suffering, and create portability of these practices so that we can bring these ideas and intentions into our lives and relationships day to day to create positive change within our selves and our larger communities.
When the years of life are piling up and the suffering has found no end, yet.
What god-forsaken thing inside of us keeps us here? Keeps us tied to life? It seems like a kind of ball, a compressed ball of all the unknown things about ourselves. It’s been there all along, whether we were paying attention to it or not. I didn’t even know it was there, keeping me alive, waking me up every morning, no matter what I was faced with. I didn’t even know it was a choice. The unknown just floated there in the center of me, all things swirling around it saying, “I will never give up.” It would just never give up. It was fundamental. It was so fundamental that it was invisible, like the pipes in a house, or the cement foundation under the earth. Life was just alive and living was just what I did. No matter how much it hurt. No matter how much all the voices, the ignorance, and misunderstandings, the harm and “virtuous” malice, the drugs and the gobs of money lost, I was some way of being in it all that said, “I will never give up.”
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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.
Read moreCreativity and COVID: A Lived Experience Perspective” at the Alternatives 2021 Conference. July 10, 2021 at 12PM EST.
The Alternatives conference continues on the legacy of the late Judi Chamberlin, a pioneering leader in the peer rights movement, and is funded entirely through registration fees and donations. “We will be ‘on our own’ again, connecting to the roots of our movement,” said conference chair Anthony Fox. “We will be free and empowered to express our unique voices, to learn from each other in the spirit of self-help, mutual support, and the principles of recovery in action, with the goal of living full and independent lives in the community.”
Read moreOne thing has remained true for me as I’ve reflected on my journey into and out of the psychiatric system. My society—the education system, culture, economy and government that I existed within as a young woman—relied on me to internalize blame for all the ways it had failed me. The unfortunate, and often dangerous, “safety” net for the emotional repercussions of this toxic arrangement was psychiatry. It was psychiatry that then dug deep to nurture this seed of self-blame by planting the identity of the “mental patient.”
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