BlissChick: Most Mental Illness is Manufactured

BlissChick: Most Mental Illness is Manufactured is a most awesomely wonderful post by my Blogger friend and fellow SRBT's (Survivor of Really Bad Things:)), Christine Claire Reed aka the BlissChick.


Over the past year I've noticed peoples heads are turning and as a society we are beginning to question the whole "illness" paradigm that surrounds the mental health industry. 

And Award Winning Scientific Journalist Robert Whitaker has had a lot to do with this. You can check out his blog on Psychology Today by clicking here and visit his personal blog by clicking here. You can also order his book Anatomy of an Epidemic from his blog.

Over the past week or so Christine (aka BlissChick) put on her PissedChick hat and came up with some astounding articles that I would like to share with you here:

1. Medicine Makes Me Sick - Love is the Cure In this post Christine bares her soul and reveals her pain and how pills seemed the easy answer but had some unfortunate side effects - including self harm behavior that had not existed before the drugs - and how she found healing...but it didn't come from the pills.
2. Most Mental Illness Is Manufactured is where we meet PissedChick:) Christine gets it on and makes it clear this illness model of our minds and emotions is questionable and that the "fix" doesn't come in pill form. We who have SRBT's - are not "sick" but injured. 
3. Ignoring Mental Injury is an excellent piece on the fact that there is a reason people feel f***ed up - and its not because our brains are broken.
4. You Are Not Mentally Ill Just Because Is an expose on how our pain - emotional, psychological - and its expression - our behaviors - have become so pathologized that we as a nation and society have been conditioned aka brainwashed - to believe something is wrong with us if we aren't "like everyone else". 

Before I go any further I feel its important to ask you to click here to read my disclaimer before you decide that you need to put me in my place or remind me that there are good therapists out there or that you believe the drugs helped you and how dare I bring this subject up...

In other words - if you are content with your quality of life and current mental health care - bravo!

But don't blast me and others for wanting more than to exist in a drugged stupor and find true, complete and full recovery from the pain of the past...something I never found and was even told in my time in the mental health system - was not possible because - of course - I was "sick" and would need the drugs "for life". 

PissedChick....thanks for taking the chance and putting your voice out there on these issues. 

Its time more of us found our inner bitch and started speaking up about these issues instead of being bullied and shamed into the silence that enables the abuse and crippling to continue as America keeps its proverbial head in the sand and pretends that these drugs are not killing, crippling and destroying lives.

Visit Christine's blog by clicking here.

Some related posts from the archives:

My guest post at Emerging From Broken: Dysfunctional Relationships with Mental Health Providers (yes; this stuff is STILL happening every day in the good ole US of A)

I Wanted to Understand this Paradigm of "Mental Illness"

Creating a New Paradigm for Myself Part 1

Creating a New Paradigm Part 2

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

"Resistance" Is Not a Bad Thing

Often in the dysfunctional relationships from my past I'd been told that I was "making" someone angry, sad, disappointed...and so on.

In other words...

I was somehow responsible for making others feel ok about themselves

by changing who I was...

what I thought

felt

or did

in order for them to be ok...

and for me to feel safe.

I Didn't Know That I Didn't Know I was Abused is a post I wrote last year on learning to recognize that my "normal" - was not normal.

And as I entered the mental health system and having left it behind me...


I realized that those who needed me to fit the role of "ill"...

sick, disordered, diseased and so on...said similar things to me.

"You are resistant, difficult, lacking insight..." and so on.

In other words - I was responsible for why their "therapies"were ineffective. In order to make them, their position and their "treatments" somehow more valid...I had to learn to accept responsibility for their failure to find and apply effective therapies.


I was required to embrace the way they defined me - instead of them as the professional finding effective ways to meet me where I was and help me find my way to where they thought I should be.

What I have since come to understand...

is that this "resistance"

saved my life

and set me free

from being manipulated, controlled, shamed, shaped and defined by those who have not yet defined themselves and confirmed that they needed to define me

in order to validate themselves and justify the failures of their "treatments".

Power and control is never ok.


Resistance

is not futile.

:)


May is "Mental Health Awareness Month". Join the resistance; say "NO" to abusive and manipulative "therapies" and "treatments". If you have experienced oppression or abuse in your own therapy relationships the first thing is to understand it is not your "fault" that a therapy model or therapeutic relationship did not work well for you. 


It is only in no longer accepting this as "normal" in our healing journeys that it will ever be considered "not normal" by society. If your therapist or treatment provider has ever used a "power play" to enforce your compliance to therapies or treatments I'd like to hear your story. You can write to me at: nolongeravictim1@gmail.com 


There is a difference between being resistant to change and being resistant to being forced to accept that you are defective or somehow at fault for a therapeutic failure. We all learn in different ways and it is wrong for anyone to attempt to shame you into accepting their process as valid over your own. An ethical therapist will never discount you.


We are all capable to create and live our best life; no one is broken forever. 


Don't let anyone tell you any differently.


Especially if they have credentials behind their name. 

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

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