Call Me Crazy: Stories from the Mad Movement
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by Irit Shimrat, Review by Louise Bouta |
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This book gives an overview of the way people who have psychiatric disorders
are treated. The mad movement consists of people who have survived this
treatment, tell about their experiences and offer suggestions for more
effective, less disabling and less costly treatment.
Irit Shimrat's personal journey from helpless patient to outspoken activist is interwoven with the bold and illuminating tales of others who are working to build a world where locked wards and forced drugging are not acceptable solutions to suffering. She says:
"The first and second times I went mad, I got professional help-hospitalization and drugs-and stayed crazy for months. The third time I got help from a friend who wasn't scared by what was happening, because she'd been there herself, and it was over in a few hours."
Many educated and informed people have come to believe that psychiatry and psychiatric drugs provide the best resort for themselves or others when in psychological distress. Our emotional and spiritual problems are declared to be biological and genetic in origin. Millions of people are persuaded that "mental illness" is a scientific reality and that psychiatric drugs can provide relief. Agencies like the Canadian Mental Health Association and the Schizophrenia Society and, in the U.S., the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) and Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) plus the professional psychiatric associations, not to mention the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), get their "educational" materials directly from the drug companies. NAMI received $11.7 million from the drug companies from mid-1996 to 1999.
The concept of mental illness is a powerful and useful one. It generates a great deal of money not only for drug companies but also for psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, mental health bureaucrats and workers. It also deters people from taking a hard look at what's really gone wrong in the lives of those who are in emotional trouble.
Many people who go (or are put) into a mental hospital get diagnosed and drugged and become mental patients for life. Once you're diagnosed, you're generally told you have to stay on drugs forever. To forestall any more of us escaping into the relatively sane social, work and tax-paying worlds, the above entities have arranged for passage of out-patient commitment laws in 40 of the United States. These laws make it legal for the police to break down the doors of our own homes on the say-so of only one person and bring us back to court and to hospitals to continue to be drugged.
Irit explains why she took for herself the label of "crazy." The label "mentally ill" has been used against us by powerful psychiatrists, police and others to put and keep us in our place.
The book ends with a checklist for helping someone in crisis, i.e. how to handle a freak-out.
An extensive bibliography includes books by Drs. Peter Breggin and Thomas
Szasz, and psychologist David Cohen. Among books listed are Bedlam by
Joe Sharkey; Beyond Bedlam: Contemporary Women Psychiatric Survivors Speak
Out, edited by Jeanine Grobe; and Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels
by Seth Farber.
Among the sources of help listed who are working together for social justice
and human rights in mental health are: www.madnation.org and Support Coalition
International, an independent nonprofit alliance of 75 organizations in
11 countries. They can be reached at: www.mindfreedom.org/about/index.html.
This book will be of interest to anyone who notices what happens to
people in the course of living their lives. Poverty, violence and loneliness
are inherent in a society that puts profits above people, and these are
things that drive people crazy.
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