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Her retreat inward seemed to take her back to these places of conflict, making her want to stamp out her own existence and vanish into nothingness. The town to which we migrated was not a refuge but another place of imperial violence, where the rescued must continuously pay a psychic price for their purported salvation.
my mother learned early on that the role of girls was to serve men and make sacrifices for their families.
When Reagan took office in 1981, he began to cut federal spending on mental health services until only 11 percent of the original budget remained.
The voices of the mentally ill are equivalent to the miner’s canary. Their stories are alerting us to the fact that something is wrong with psychiatry’s overreliance on a biological model of suffering.
There were a lot of things we didn’t know about schizophrenia in the 1990s, when my mother first entered the mental health care system. We didn’t know that “psychoses have a briefer duration in the Third World,”8 or that people in non-Western countries were ten times more likely to experience “nearly complete remission,”9 or that the “normative treatment for schizophrenia in American culture may significantly make things worse … that it does so by repeatedly creating the conditions for demoralization and despair.”10 We didn’t know that it was possible to recover from schizophrenia in some
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Forced or free is a false dichotomy.
Because his mortality had loomed over me my whole life. I had grown numb to the idea of him dying,
People who hear voices are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
The Hearing Voices Network, a self-advocacy group, has also shown that engaging with voices can make them more peaceful.
Voice-hearers are invited to focus on the voices, recount what they are saying, to record them, document them and integrate them into their lives. In short, the style of living changes from one of denial to acceptance, through which individuals begin to transform their relation to the experience.
All we could really count on was now, and if I knew that, why didn’t I turn around and stay the night? In the coming weeks, I would torture myself with this question, then try to extinguish it by telling myself that it wouldn’t have made a difference. What’s another night compared to forever?
