WE HAD TO DESTROY IT TO SAVE IT

“WE HAD TO DESTROY IT TO SAVE IT.”

I am now 87 years old.  Much earlier in my life, when I was just 36, in fact, my mind was almost destroyed as the result of a medical misdiagnosis and what is now regarded as criminally inept psychiatry.  I write of my experiences in full detail in a book that I have written and published free on the Internet and also as a paperback. 

Chapter 1 describes how in the course of one year, that opened with two episodes of cold-turkey, I was hospitalised for a total of 20 weeks, received 23 ECTs, 20 episodes of insulin shock ‘therapy’, and innumerable combinations of benzodiazepines and barbiturates.

 

A year that ended with a farcical second-opinion from someone who went on to become a doyen in the world of psychiatry.

“We had to destroy it to save it.”

Such was the bizarre reasoning given by the U.S. Authorities to justify the annihilation of a village during that most bizarre of conflicts, the Vietnam War.

              As I began to write my book, I trawled through my own memory, and read, and came to terms with, the copious notes and correspondence that formed my medical records.  When you read what I have written, I think that you may agree that the same ‘justification’ could be applied to the almost-achieved outcome of the treatments that were brought to bear to ‘save’ my malfunctioning mind.  The treatments were applied with good intent, I have no doubt, by people who were established in their professions of medicine and psychiatry.  In the process of being treated, my mind was almost annihilated.  So what went wrong?  Well, to start with, at the outset, there was nothing wrong with my mind - it was functioning well and I was in control.  But something must have gone wrong and to describe it is the purpose of the first part of my tale.  The path ahead may at times seem a little tortuous, but I am sure that you will find the journey interesting.

The journey continues in my book, and after a number of years and several chapters, eventually arrives at the day when “…a presence that I could not see moved out of the space in front of me, into me…  I began to hear voices…”

In the book, I deliberately separate the onset of ‘voices’ from the earlier ‘psychiatry’ because there is no way in which they are connected.

The ECT – Electro-convulsive Therapy to give it its full title – left me with many lasting impressions and memories that eventually found their way into this poem –

Early Closing Thursday
by Roy Vincent (1925 - )

It will make you much better, he said,
No, it won’t make a hole in your head.
The current’s quite small,
Hardly any at all,
And of course you won’t wake up quite dead.

The nurses, all gentle and kind,
Never told me that bits of my mind,
Would soon disappear,
That I’d feel very queer,
And not know before from behind.

Memories once precious to me,
Have vanished, no trace, all agree.
The voice of my child,
That amused and beguiled,
Was erased by the ‘cure’, E.C.T.

At Work, was I then in disgrace
From this hole in my mind – this great space?
For I found, to my shame,
This face - What’s his name?
Or this name – Who’s got the right face?

Who began this outrageous farce?
Who decides to switch on and to pass
A current designed
To ‘repair’ this bent mind?
Do they really know elbow from arse?

Why ‘Early Closing Thursday’?
Because it makes just as much sense as ‘Electro Convulsive Therapy"

“There is no theoretical basis to justify it.  There is considerable criticism of its extensive use because it may produce permanent brain damage, especially losses of memory and intelligence.”

So writes the Oxford Companion to the Mind.  For most people, the implication of ‘therapy’ is of some process that will aid recovery from whatever ails them, physically or mentally, and achieve it benevolently, without harming them.  By what stretch of the meaning of words can a process be so described that actually harms the very thing, the human mind, that it is claimed to be saving?

“My mind to me a kingdom is.
Such present joys therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
That earth affords or grows by kind.”
The poet, Dyer*, could not have guessed
What would be done to minds distressed.
This precious place with knowledge filled,
Shocked, drugged, benumbed - then killed.
(*Sir Edward Dyer 1540 – 1607)

The poem was short-listed in a poetry competition and subsequently published in Greater Goings On…(than you could ever guess)  ISBN  0-9544030-10

There is one poem that never fails to move me.  It is anonymous, and was highly commended by the competition judges – here it is 

LETTER TO A CONSULTANT PSYCHIATRIST

You gave me a questionnaire once a week.

21 questions to evaluate my mood.

I had to rate myself on a scale from 0-3.

You adjusted my medication according to my score.

You talked of biochemical imbalances, synapses and neurotransmitters.

You told me my thoughts were distorted and dysfunctional.

You told me that the things that had happened to me did not matter.

What mattered was how I perceived these things.

I believed your definition of illness.

I took your psychotropic cocktail and allowed you access to my thoughts.

If I could think differently, as you prescribed, then I’d be fine.

You searched for signs of abnormality and found them.

You magnified the worst aspects of me and reflected them back until I saw nothing else.

You isolated me in a world where people were purely medical problems to be solved.

The stories we shared of trauma, abuse and neglect were merely coincidental.

All you were interested in was the manifestation of symptoms.

Was I an interesting collection for you to play with?

You didn’t get a chance to give me E.C.T.

You left – moved onward and upward in your career.

And I was left – incoherent on hospital pocket money, scrabbling through ashtrays for fag-ends to smoke.

With little left to my name but the clothes I stood up in and a list of diagnoses.

If I talk of having my life stolen, of brainwashing, of being used for chemical experiments,

I’ll be labelled paranoid, delusional, psychotic, and be medicated accordingly.

So, I’ll keep my thoughts to myself, and try to rediscover the person I was before you tried to cure me.

                       ANON

~    ~     ~   ~    ~    ~     ~

My own book LISTENING TO THE SILENCES is available free on www.royvincent.net

Other writing appears on my Blog www.roycvincent.blogspot.com

Inevitably there will be some repetition between websites and Blogs as I try to reach different readers.