My impressions of psychiatry

I have a friend who once said – having met him in a mental health unit – that everyone there had “schizophrenia” but he didn’t. He was the first person I talked to in the unit, we’d both used drugs, and he went to the same school as my cousins.  We became lifelong friends, 24 years.

My view was that everyone there had got into spiritual difficulties and none were “schizophrenic” and I had escaped the imposed psychic dictatorship of my parents even if the place was rock bottom.  I should explain some more: before this time, I had had to hide the voices from my parents. Of course they saw through this, and could tell I had been in a “trance”, which they discouraged. To them channelling the voices was “bad.”  In my eyes I thought I would now be free to live with my voices and I was willing to make do in some crap flat somewhere.  Unfortunately, I didn’t, instead they put me on meds and so I concentrated on friendships and spirituality.

But when I first ran into spiritual difficulties myself, I had never met anyone with this supposed “schizophrenia.”  And I wasn’t alone.  I was being initiated into the secret sub-community of voice hearers.  Of course it wouldn’t be such a secret if there was education in schools!!  One in a hundred people in Ireland hear voices.  Why wasn’t I told how common it is?   Why hadn’t I talked to one of these so called “schizophrenics?”  Why are they kept away from people, not mixing and not accepted?

People who are given the diagnosis of “schizophrenia” are the last social group not to be accepted by the public.  It’s a crime to call someone a racist word or show hatred of a person’s sexuality but if you google “schizophrenia hate” the only result you will find is that people so labelled are described as hostile!!  People can’t legally be nasty to us because disability abuse is a hate crime too but that doesn’t appear to stop them; there doesn’t seem to be any legal precedents, cases or arrests when people who are exhibiting bizarre behaviour, are subjected to abuse and called names.  Or maybe these people act completely normally but are ostracized by the neighbourhood they live in.  Is it because we voice hearers agree with the stereotype, and maybe think we are the ones in the wrong?  Did we harass voice hearers before we heard them? Yes, probably.

Maybe you’ve seen the sports presenter David Icke going on Terry Wogan’s show saying he was Jesus or Shelley Duvall going on Dr Phil’s talk show saying aliens were talking to her, or have a relative you don’t talk about.  I think living with voices and visions and recovery should be more widely exposed so that we don’t have to live in secret; it would be good someday to find we are no longer an object of curiosity or hate.

Yes, there have been a minority of cases when voice hearers have hurt others but it’s rare.  If they had been sufficiently prepared or helped by education on how to handle their “schizophrenia”, would it still have happened?  Surely there should be proper education of the general public starting at a young age, though I can see that the educational material still needs to be carefully created.  But talking about experiences like hearing voices before it happens to you, is better than talking about it after, is it not?

And so I entered psychiatry alone, clueless and ignorant.  I expected upon entering the psychiatrist’s office to see a couch like the psychoanalysts I had seen on the television.  I expected low lighting and an inviting environment.  Instead, I was brought into an office that was no different from a civil servant’s.  The psychiatrist looked and behaved like a stockbroker.

He had no interest in voices, or in who I had met or who I suspected had caused the voices.  He had no interest in who they were, whether they followed me home, and whether I was scared.  He scrawled something down on a notepad, something.  I believe I have the legal right to read my own notes, and maybe I should.  I saw him for over 15 years, and he did look after my welfare, helping to get me housing and benefits.

A lot of psychiatric patients don’t see the same psychiatrist at each visit, I am lucky in that respect, everywhere is different.  How can people’s health be treated so flippantly by psychiatry which demonstrates that our views of our experiences are irrelevant?  We get that psychiatrists see the “schizophrenia” diagnosis as permanent.  Yet the reasons we experience these symptoms are complex and the response from the psychiatric profession seems practically uniform!!

I have been a hearing voices group facilitator for 20 years and have seen this happen repeatedly.  The stories are all so similar.  A psychiatrist must surely see the same events played out in his patients’ lives that I do – he knows the way it happens so why doesn’t he use this clinical gift?  Why doesn’t he chat about the person’s thresholds, their worries, what he has seen works for people? Potentially he has so much to offer.  He has seen hundreds of people, he must know the pitfalls and advantages to decisions we make.  If a person decides psychiatric drugs aren’t for them, they are deserted by psychiatry.  Why not bring the person in to talk over their journey? Sometimes we hear on the news of people who have done bad things mistakenly when off their psychiatric drugs. Maybe supervision could work. Knowing how common voice hearing is, why not attempt to normalise the experience and I say it again – give relevant, intensive education? Reassurance from the psychiatrist that what you are experiencing is common, would be nice, would be amazing.

Give me some love. Please.

Information & support for those who hear voices can be found at hearing voices network

Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.