By Isobel and Kalia
Let’s take back our brains, our perfectly bad brains. We are mental but we’re not ill. We refuse to be told were sick or crazy. We’re not sick, we’re sick of it!
Sick of being drugged, made to conform to society’s standards of emotional stability and narrow perception of reality. Sick of the money driven psychotropic drug industry that is said to be “science” but is actually a capitalist money making machine.
Psychiatric diagnosis is not evidence based. It is a tool in dehumanizing us, alienating us from our emotions and instincts, and perpetuating the stigma. Misdiagnosis leads to treatment of nonexistent disorders, leads to an array of side effects, leads to correcting the side effects with another pill.
Sick of putting trust into “doctors” because they’ve gone through the “higher education” system. University: birthed out of capitalism to standardize knowledge, vomiting out PhDs, perpetuating the social divide and elitism in education. So I say, fuck doctors, fuck professionalism. I’m sick of it.
Because prozac caused “mania” so he prescribed me a mood stabilizer. Because the pills zombified me, dulled my senses, left me flat and emotionless. Because when i fought back he tackled me to the ground, cuffed my wrists and ankles to the bed and stuck a needle in my ass without consent. Is this how you treat a “sick” person?
Sick of sexism and racism in the mental health system. Because electroconvulsive therapy still exists in the US and two thirds of people who receive electroconvulsive therapy are women. Because a person of color in the us is 200% more likely to be diagnosed as schizophrenic than a white person.
Because when a teenage girl feels deeply, when she rebels, she is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Borderline of what?
Every one of us is holding onto generations of trauma. The modern version of homo sapiens is twisted so far from nature, our roots, our hearts, the animal that we are, here now.
The amount of people diagnosed with depression is increasing exponentially every generation. This is a symptom of the growing consumer culture in the Western world.
Our basic human needs are being forgotten, we’re losing track of the narrative, in a society rooted in artifice. The mental health system is counterproductive in treating our trauma and healing humanity. The priority is not to heal but to oppress.
The psychiatrist assists the patient in putting shackles on their neurons. The mental health system represses free thought and is equivalent to the modern day stoning of the witch. We must deprogram society, unlearn what we’ve been taught. We must call bullshit.
I feel the earths rotation and see that we’re living. I hear what you feel, it is valid. Every little neuron in our brains are perfect, perfectly bad. I want to talk about emotions, the fantastical and horrific. I want to experience my emotions fully without being shamed, without being dismissed as the “crazy girl”, without being chained down, locked up.
I want to create a space where we can openly discuss our experience of being survivors of demoralization and the mental health system. Where we can discuss healing, outside a doctors office, on our own terms.
Let’s talk about it! Let’s continue to revolutionize the way we see mental health. Let’s de-medicalize “mental illness”, view it as a social issue. Let’s talk about the psych ward. Let’s talk about our trauma. Let’s share our most soothing herbal tea recipes.
Because maybe the illness is not personal but an epidemic of Western culture. The system is sick, capitalism is sick, consumerism is sick. And we could be the medicine.
This is call for submissions for a zine “calling all psychopaths” open to absolutely anything! Send me your art and stories to isobelandkalia@gmail.com!