National Empowerment Center - Articles

Will Hall’s Recovery Story

My first experience with psychiatry was taking Prozac at age 24. At first it was like the best cup of coffee I had ever had, I was being very productive at work, getting up early, and really feeling “better than well.” But then I had a manic reaction to the Prozac. I was suddenly acting very differently at work, wearing weird clothes and getting into big arguments with my co-workers. It was the first time anything like this had ever happened to me, and it was absolutely terrifying. No doctor warned me, and nobody got me off the Prozac when the manic reaction started. I ended up losing a long term job as a result of this drug side effect.

2 years after that, I ended up in the locked unit of a public psychiatric ward in San Francisco. It was like a prison. I was told I was a danger to myself and that it was for my own good, but like so many people it was really being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I begged them not to lock me up, because I didn't want to lose my two jobs. I kept saying Please let me go so I can go to work, please, I can make a no harm contract, I don't want to miss work. But I ended up losing those jobs.

That began a year-long stay in the public mental health system. I needed help, but instead I was treated like a disobedient child with a broken brain, punished and controlled, including more than two months in a locked unit. I went from being a human being to being a mental patient. I was put in restraints. After being restrained I had nightmares that I was being raped, and I still have strong trauma reactions to anything that reminds me of that experience. I was put in an isolation cell, threatened with being strip-searched, given more than a dozen different drugs, and subjected to patronizing group therapy.

I spent several months on a very powerful psychiatric drug called Navane, used to treat schizophrenia. It completely changed my personality and denied me the most basic sense of who I was; it made me stupider, slower, fatter, and also because of the side effects, at times more desperate and suicidal. At one residential facility I was at, a man had killed himself right before I arrived. A patient who was his friend told me why: he was having severe side effects from his meds and no one was listening to him. The meds were why he jumped off the roof and killed himself, not mental illness.

I have photos of that time, and the look in my eyes is totally different, not me, a different person. I was basically a zombie, but I was being docile so they considered it recovery. Today I have some lingering side effects from the Navane and other drugs I took, including twitching in my body, memory disturbances, and worsened panic. There could also be other long term damage and side effects that I may never be able to sort out and recognize.

My father is an electroshock survivor from hospitalizations in the 40s and 50s; he was tortured by psychiatry at the request of my grandfather as a form of punishment for acting out as an adolescent. My father's emotional scars from this abuse directly affected me and the rest of my family, because he never got adequate treatment and carried around severe PTSD all during my childhood. Of course, when my psychiatrists where I was locked up found out this about me, they used it to try to convince me my problems were genetic brain malfunctions correctable by medications. Not once did they ever ask me about my own childhood experiences of trauma. Only later did I learn that there is no actual basis for the genes/brain disorder claim, that it is only psychiatric dogma.

After more than two months locked up they said they had tried everything, and that when nothing else helps, electroshock is needed. I desperately wanted to get better, so I began to consider agreeing to electroshock, which they told me was completely safe and effective and had no negative side effects.

But then I got very lucky. I was there against my will because I was supposed to be harmful, but a social worker came and suddenly announced that the funding that was paying for me to be there had run out, so they were releasing me immediately. So I went from too sick to release to out on the streets overnight. I ended up in a homeless shelter that was dangerous and run down, but being out of the locked ward instantly lifted my depression.

The humiliation of being labeled schizophrenic threatened to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was socialized into being a mental patient. I was encouraged to see myself as a broken invalid, and instead of my strengths I focused on my weaknesses and vulnerabilities as evidence of being a defective human being. Everything became a symptom. I remember telling my hospital psychiatrist that I was reading existentialism and Marxist philosophy, and later I found out he had put this down in my permanent medical record. They also told me that my feelings about being bisexual were part of my illness.

Today I live with ongoing and very realistic fear of misunderstanding and stigma, and I have to hide my psych history from most people in my life. Once you've revealed your psychiatric history to someone and then had them treat you as less than human for it, you learn to keep your history hidden from most people. This means a life in the shadows, a second class citizenship, a sense of not being part of the human community.

I have stayed out of the hospital for more than 10 years. I do a lot of things to promote my own mental health, but I learned absolutely none of it in the mental health system. Not a SINGLE THING. The mental health system was completely useless to my mental health. Today I do yoga, I meditate, I do sports, I volunteer in the community, I see a homeopathic doctor and I am very careful about my nutrition. I have to avoid milk, caffeine, and sugar, which directly cause my anxiety and symptoms to worsen. Of course, in the hospital every meal included milk, caffeine, and sugar.

It took me ten years before I could start researching and doing activism on these issues, without being overcome with fear and traumatic memories. Today I still can be overwhelmed when I try to read books about the mental health system.

When I moved to Northampton I was very fortunate to meet Oryx Cohen, a psychiatric abuse survivor who had been diagnosed as Bipolar. In this area there was no group run by and for people with severe mental illness labels themselves -- everything was run by the mental health system. No one was protesting psychiatric abuse, it was as if it didn't exist. So three years ago we co-founded the Freedom Center together to break the silence.

Today we have a free weekly yoga class, a weekly support group, a writing group, we do advocacy for people facing abuses and have regular community events – you can find out more by checking out our website www.freedom-center.org. You can also read people's stories on our Speak Out pages and on the Oral Histories page of our website, including stories of other people recovering without medication.

We learned that the protection and advocacy system, the human rights officers, the DMH complaints system – it might be better than it was twenty years ago, but the system is still failing to protect people's basic rights. We've advocated around full blown medical malpractice, where staff are ignoring major side effects and the client ends up in a coma or with tardive dyskinesia brain damage, and nothing happens when complaints are filed.

So we do what we can. We have helped people fight forced drugging, helped people avoid hospitalization, helped work for phone access, told people about drug side effects their doctors didn't, helped people locked up get basic rights like access to dental care, organized against drug overmedication, connected people with low-cost alternative health care, and done whatever we could to help and advocate for people. We've done all this as volunteers and with a shoestring budget. We also work with mental health staff and professionals. We welcome them to join us as allies and supporters, because we understand that staff are in this profession because they care about people, and that often they are trapped in institutions they want to change.

Freedom Center's work is controversial, and people sometimes stereotype us as being anti-drugs. We are pro-self determination. We don't tell people what to do or tell people to stop taking drugs. Many people who are part of the Freedom Center take psychiatric medications. We help people find out for themselves what works best for them, because only you can determine for yourself what helps you. We help people get off drugs slowly and carefully, but only if that is what they want to do. And we call for accurate, honest information about psychiatric drugs so people can make a truly informed choice. Right now the system is not giving people accurate information about drugs or about mental illness.

We also want to make sure people have access to alternatives. The whole system is focused on drugging people and downplaying how harmful drugs can be, and there are few real alternatives offered. Right now the mental health system is playing custodian to people in our community who are so medicated they are visibly stiff and blunted – you see some of these folks walking down the street year after year. We need to be honest that medicating people into submission is a failure. We need more funding for social supports, for therapy, and for alternative health care choices.

I recently saw a video from England, and I was completely surprised to see a public mental health client meet with a body worker who was giving her regular massages as part of her treatment. People say we're somehow being unrealistic to expect that people in mental health crises should have access to alternative health care, such as massage and bodywork – but they are in fact already doing it in England. And I recently learned that homeopathy is mainstream medicine in Europe -- you can get insurance reimbursement for it and the public health systems provide it. I have to pay for homeopathy out of my own pocket, and I can't always afford to get all the care I need because my insurance doesn't cover it. There are also countries that use a lot less drugs than we do and have much higher recovery rates.

Freedom Center is also opposed to forced treatment. We have had involuntary hospitalization, restraints, seclusion, and forced drugging happen to us, and we know for ourselves how violent and damaging force can be. There are alternatives, and we need to start funding them and using them. Voluntary programs work better, cost less, and don't run the risk of traumatizing people, which drives them away from services. Forced treatment is based on denying people equal rights under the law. Everyone in society has the right to refuse medical treatment, even if it is going to harm them to do so, such as cancer patients who can refuse treatment even if it risks their life. But psychiatric patients are routinely denied this basic right.

So I just want to close by encouraging everyone to read Bob's powerful book Mad In America. I would also urge people to read the National Council on Disability 2000 Report From Privileges to Rights: People Labeled with Psychiatric Disabilities Speak for Themselves, which Judi was very much involved in creating and is available for free through our website. And for those of you who are students at Smith College School of Social Work, I think it is important that you work to include Mad In America and the NCD Report as part of the required reading in your curriculum, because we need to include the missing voices of psychiatric abuse survivors.

This story was used by Permission of Will Hall and the Freedom Center:
www.freedom-center.org/index.php

This is where the content goes