The Feminist Client
Something was awry. And not just the fact that I was being
hospitalised for my levels of emotional distress. This new psychiatrist was
altogether too interested in me. He started stroking one hand with the other, a
suggestive movement which recalled to me the letter I’d sent the mental health
staff which included a reference to an orgasm-free masturbation session I’d had
which had gotten me thinking about the deeper reasons behind me being
hospitalised.
No stranger to sexual predators, I offered him my complete
silence, and a defiant stare. I let him know, nonverbally, that I knew what he
was up to, and I was not going to fall for his trap. It worked. He was fuming
by the time he ended the session with me.
I relaxed a bit, but not much. For a mentally vulnerable 22
year old woman, the ward was a place full of menace. Some of that was from the
patients (like the man who addressed all the females of the ward by the c word,
volubly, and who made to harm one of the female nurses; like the man whose
advances I resisted who would punch the wall immediately above my head), but
mostly it was from the mental health staff.
It was the nurses I had the most contact with, and I was
disgusted by their dehumanising attitudes towards me. I convinced myself that I
would keep record of every injustice, every slight. In the end it proved all
too much: it was all day, every day. It was the way of life of a system that is
beginning to die out, but persists in reproducing itself to this day.
Psychiatry seems to me all about distrusting lived emotional
experiences. I have spoken to client after client, and there isn’t a single one
without a horrible story of abuse and/or neglect to tell. Instead of providing
clients with immediate access to intensive psychotherapy, they are immediately
drugged with powerful, usually sedative, neuroleptics, and enclosed within a
small space with fifty-odd others who are similarly going through some of the
worst experiences of their lives. Here’s the fun part: to get out of there you
are forced to demonstrate “compliance” to this abusive system, and show that
you are sufficiently social by opening up to the other clients, some of whom
might lash out to you if you inadvertently trigger them. (In my time at Kiloh,
I had a piece of wood thrown at me, and generic hospital dessert smeared across
my back.)
But let’s go back to the realm of emotions, that part of
human experience which is so deeply distrusted by psychiatry. There is a
long-standing tradition within Western philosophy to associate mental processes
with masculine energy, and the emotions with feminine energy. Just as the
dominant class of men detests women and treats them as an underclass, the
psychiatric class loathes people who express socially unacceptable emotion.
Instead of treating deep emotional distress as a symptom of a flawed society,
psychiatrists use their power to obliterate the unique, organic emotional journeys
of those who have been harmed by unequal power structures and the abuse
inherent in such structures. Instead of honouring our emotions and validating
our experiences, we are treated as abominations at worst and inconveniences at
best.
The way the mental health system treats its clients is
inhumane, and is an open secret that needs rectifying. Pioneer communities
within countries such as Finland and Norway have implemented a much more humane
system called Open Dialogue, which treats a person who presents with deep
emotional distress as the biggest authority on themselves. They are asked about
their experiences and listened to, within the context of their family, friends
and community helpers, who are also present for the sessions. The focus is not
on the individual as a biological error, but how their interaction with wider
society has led them to a crisis point. Medication is a last resort.
Open Dialogue is a bright point in my experience in this
world. It convinces me that somewhere, out there, my emotions matter. My
experiences with deep emotional distress are meaningful and I am valuable to society.
The good news is that there are the beginnings of Open
Dialogue taking hold in Australia. While it is not available to anyone who
presents with deep emotional distress, if things keep moving in the right
direction, it very well might be. But we cannot rest idle and wait for “the
inevitable” to happen. Nothing is inevitable. We have to make it happen, by
educating our friends, colleagues and people around us. To let them know about
the deep perversion of justice current psychiatric practices enact. To make
them aware that everybody has the right to be treated as though their emotions
are based on something real – because they are.
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