Walking In The City

ALONG THE VOID WITH GRISLY VOICES,

AND FLICKERING LIGHTS.

LET THE RAZOR SPEAK…

ON YOUR WRISTS THIS TIME…

LET THEM WEEP

WHERE YOU HOWL TO BE FREE OF THEM.

FREE OF HOW THEY HOLD YOU UP AND BEND NOT BREAK UNDER THE WEIGHT OF IT.

DO YOU SUFFER MY STAIN?

YOU HAVE NOT FATHERED ME LIFE…

YOU HAVE NOT MOTHERED ME LIFE…

YOU HAVE STOOD AND WATCHED THESE CRIMES AGAINST ME WITH AN OCEAN OF INDIFFERENT STARS.

AND HIDDEN ME UNDER INK BLACK NIGHT SO CARS WOULD PASS ME, BABBLING OF DESTINATIONS, UNWILLING TO WAIT.

THAT TORTURE THOUGH HACKED AND ILL HUMORED…

IT WAS MINE.

UNLIKE THIS NORMALCY I SEEK NOW.

THE SALT, SUCKED SINS (I ASSUMED TO BE PAST TIMES) THROUGH TEARS IN ONE STROKE AND DRIED THEM SO THEY WOULDN’T COME.

AND COMPOSURE,

THE BEGGER,

OF

TIDES TO STOP COMING, BUT THEY CAN’T…

PEACE TO RAIN, BUT IT WONT…

PEOPLE TO SEE, BUT THEY DON’T

SO, IN QUICK CRUEL LIGHT,

WHAT LINES SHALL I TRACE, WITH BLOOD?

WHAT BLOOD SHOULD I LET, WITH STEEL?

UN CARVED SKIN,

LIKE THE THICKEST OF FROSTS,

BEGS TO BE CLEAVED…

LEST IT REVEAL A MAIDEN…

OR A BEAST

Whenever I visit people in psych wards, I can feel the echo of my own suffering.  I hear the words that used to reverberate inside of me years ago.  Words like those that I wrote at age 17 (above) when all that life consisted of was pain.  I am leveled by the horror of how we greet this pain in people. 

The mainstream mental health system in the western world is a system that has blood on its hands.  It is tempting to think that we have come so far from the days where strong emotion was met with lobotomy.  But we have not come so far from that.  Before I go into what I am about to go into, I will say that there are some unsung heroes in the business of mental health care.  They care in a business where their bravery and caring is an assault on “the way things are done”.  I do not doubt their motives, nor minimize the good that they have done.  I do not mean to demonize the totality of individuals who work for this system.  But I must tell you that it is a system that has claimed the life of millions all in the name of trying to ‘help’.

The psych wards are full of people who have been admitted for some form of self abuse and whom admit to having conscious awareness of abuse in their personal histories, many of them teenagers.  This is the world we live in… a world where abuse drives a teenager into an institution where their PTSD symptoms are dealt with by strapping them down to a bed and shoving needles in their veins.  Any of you who understand somatic therapy are probably writhing in your seats reading about this form of ‘treatment”.

The only way to justify abuse is to think you deserve it in some way.  How do people justify abuse at the hands of mental health professionals?  By becoming convinced that they are mentally ill.  I will tell you that after 23 years of being immersed in this world of mental health from both sides of the fence, most people who have been diagnosed with mental illness are not mentally ill at all.  Instead, they have developed adaptations to cope with painful environmental distress; but outside of those distressful environments, these adaptations are no longer beneficial and are instead detrimental.  Instead, they feel in a world that does not allow feeling.    

It is a travesty when feeling is the enemy of the very business that is designed to care take people’s feelings.   What if it isn’t wrong to feel furious or depressed or anxious or even suicidal?  What if you feel that way for a valid reason?  What if feeling that way doesn’t mean something is wrong with you, but instead that something happened or is happening to you to lead you to feeling that way?  Then it means you aren’t mentally ill.  It means that the way you are behaving is an adaptation, not an illness.  

When a person walks into a standard mental health clinic and says they are not feeling good; no one thinks to say, “That makes sense; you probably have really good reason to feel that way let’s figure out why and what we can do about it”.  Instead, they start by saying “Uh- oh, something must be really wrong with you because it’s not ok to feel that way.”  This seemingly benign and standard way of approaching mental illness puts the ‘patient’ at war with himself.  He will start to relate to himself as crazy.  It ensures that now he will see himself as living with an enemy inside his own skin.  He will distrust himself.  The chances of him “getting better” with this terrified relationship to himself is now very, very small.  We tell him, the way to stay safe from this ‘defective’ side of himself is to medicate.  So we medicate him.  We medicate him with drugs that he will most likely be dependent on for the rest of his life.  And the pharmaceutical companies benefit by this...  And this is if the medication does actually (genuinely or through placebo effect) make him feel better.

The reality is no one knows enough about these medications.  No one knows enough about the brain.  No one knows enough about any aspect of this business to be able to say exactly what these medications will and won’t do.  Psych meds can make a person worse instead of better so the entire business of psychiatric medication from the creation of the drugs to the testing of the drugs to the administering of the drugs is based on trial and error.  People lose their lives every day because of this willingness to take risks that should never be taken.  And what’s worse is we are taking those risks with children now.  We are medicating the brains of children whose minds have not even developed yet.  And you know what?  No one knows how it will turn out.  We are dolling out incredibly dangerous psych meds like candy for every single emotional and mental complaint.  And what people in the field will not be honest with you about is that if you subject yourself to these drugs, you are essentially subjecting yourself to a human experiment.  An experiment you may just regret for the rest of your life.  That being said, I believe in freedom.  If people are desperate, they should absolutely be allowed to take these kinds of risks.  But they should be well informed about just what an experiment it is before deciding to take a risk.     

People in this industry love to hide behind what they are taught in medical school or psychology courses in college.  They do so under the belief that the information shared there is the “best info we have yet”.  But is it?  If you follow the “money trail” for who is funding many of the studies that then get converted into standard training for new students, you will want to throw it out the nearest window.  So many alternative techniques exist for ‘mental illnesses’ all over the world.  There are different approaches and methodologies that actually do work.  It is a travesty when mental health professionals fail to seriously and sincerely explore them.  The world is in a spot relative to human health, where it must shift towards integrative medicine.  

So many people who have simply been hurt and who simply do not fit into a box of “how you’re supposed to be” are lost to this system.  We are slowly killing our revolutionaries, our geniuses, our philosophers, our change makers, our future leaders, our empaths, our artists.  The very people who have come here to make this world great and to change it into something better are being turned against themselves before they can mature enough to grace this world with their gifts.  We will all suffer because of it.

Today, the mental health system is a system of no return.  Like being pulled out to sea in a rip tide.  By getting into it, you will be lucky to find shore again.  So many people lose years of their lives finding this out the hard way.

A funny thing happens the minute people get out of the mainstream mental health system… They start getting better.  They learn how to stop fearing themselves.  I am now in a position of teaching open-minded psychiatrists and psychologists a different way to deal with these conditions.  Every time I shake hands with these therapists who are brave enough to think outside the box when the box so obviously isn’t working, I feel like the world is one step closer to being a world that does not have to be coped with.  I feel like we are one step closer to creating a kind of world where pain is not the perpetual human condition.

Today, I have a message for anyone in the mental health field.  If you remember nothing else that I say, remember this:  The worst thing you could ever do to someone from a position of authority is to turn them against themselves.  The worst thing you could do is to make them believe that it is wrong to feel how they feel and so something must be wrong with them.  It is not malice that makes ‘therapists’ do this.  It is ignorance.  But it is ignorance that must end.  And I will dedicate myself to ending that ignorance for as long as I draw breath. 

In today's world, a war has been declared against feeling.  Today, and for as long as it takes, I ask you to stand with me on the side of feeling.