There were two mental health conferences in Ireland in November 2013. One at which I had the honour of presenting my argument that we need a mental health policy (indeed any policy at all) that is gender sensitive, at the other I was thankfully not in attendance. Why one an honour and one not you might ask, seeing as they are both about mental health? Allow me to explain: I’m an insider to the psychiatric system in Ireland, a mole as some might say. A feminist mole no less but to some that seems to be part of my general propensity to be ‘odd’, it goes with the territory of madness.
"I am also an insider to human distress"
My feminist take on mental health is that yes, mental health has finally edged its’ way into the limelight recently but albeit at a price. It is presented to us not as humans in distress but as an ‘illness’ a bit like any other illness, and that it’s okay to have it. A bit like a broken leg I was once told, but anyone who has been paralysed by the hopelessness, sadness and loss that is depression will tell you, it is nothing like a broken leg.
Now, that makes it easier to talk about in the public arena and we need to talk about it. But calling it an illness implies a certain weakness, something is broken, it pathologises the individual and of course requires a cure, a fix. Enter the army of willing psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical companies both of whom rely on people being, and staying mentally ill for their very existence. We begin to experience
acute sadness, loss and inexplicable pain, life becomes unmanageable and our first point of contact? The GP, who whips out the prescription pad and with a hearty sweep of a Prozac logoed pen (a bribe from the clever pharmaceutical rep train in sales, not human distress) sends you packing with an illegible note to the pharmacist that you will never know anything about, let alone make an informed decision on. If you are really bad the psychiatrist might allow you to sit in the waiting room for two hours and then grace you with 5 minutes of his or her presence – more Prozac pens and scribbles. We have been dancing this little dance with madness for centuries, packaging and repackaging it as something that might make it easier to digest, less secretive, more normal. It hasn’t really ever hit the nail on the head though, for most, not even close. For the women who are more likely to be diagnosed as mentally ill than men, because women are, after all, hormonal, neurotic and just quite mad, the hammer was never so far from its’ target. As someone with personal and professional (I moonlighted as a social worker for a bit) experience of the mad, bad and sad, I should know.
So if not illness then what? Enter the honourable conference and here we have it: The meaning of Madness.
"What does it mean to be mad?"
There are those of us who have been fighting against the labels that pathologies us, the system that compounds the myths around us as sick and unable, that ignore or even stifle our strengths and resilience. Sometimes they even try to send electric shocks through our brains. We are of course strong because not only have we survived the atrocities that made us mad and sad – the violence, the abuse, the loss and pain of human suffering that those of us on the receiving end cannot simply ignore, but we have survived being medicated into oblivion, sometimes electrocuted by a psychiatrist and made to appear ‘ill’. The wonderfully insightful authors Corry & Tubridy wrote that depression is an emotion, not a disease, a normal response to an abnormal situation. Those of us that agree were all at the honourable conference in UCC, where we could find the space for our voices to be heard, for human experience to be legitimised as just so and not translated into medical jargon with a bitter pill to have to swallow. So, while the professionals were all up the country boring the socks off each-other vying for most jargon-filled-presentation (for a mighty €200 a pop) the real people were doing it for free in the Brookfield health science complex. For anyone in attendance you already know, for others I can write to you here about the strength and courage it took for so many to come together and find ways to express the meanings behind what has been perceived as madness, as deviant. It’s not always that way, many find deep spiritual meaning behind what has happened for them. Some find the fighting spirit that stays alive no matter what, others navigate their way through distress with the help of other human emotions: by laughing, crying, screaming, by shouting truth out loud because the truth will set you free.
The bottom line? The next time you see an advertisement or a newspaper article with ‘mental illness’ written on it somewhere look beyond it, wonder if that person you know, or you, are really ‘ill’. Maybe it helps to liken it to a broken leg but remember too that something happened to the leg for it to break, it may have suffered a trauma, it too may be sensitive and highly intelligent. Most importantly remember that all the medical help alone could not have healed that break, that humans have the capacity to heal themselves, like bone, from the inside out. Always remember that there is something that comes from within, something inside so strong.