By John Allen

No realization is quite as humbling to those of us—and we are many—who fancy ourselves “dissidents,” “revolutionaries,” or agitators of any kind than the horrifying truth that we all have, by the mere fact of being homo sapien monsters conditioned the way we have been from birth, as this: each and every single individual is responsible for the idea of the collective, the nourishment of it, and the present horrifying state of society and by extension, state.  None of us are exempt from the creation of fictitious societal norms.  Beneath our independent clothing, whether bought from the local mall or a thrift shop (the former more likely than the latter, if we look at the actual state of the so-called young revolutionaries of today) beats a scarred heart that has been beaten into docility and fear by the status quo.

The question, of course, is whether any of us have the audacity, willpower and vitality of rebellion to heal it entirely, which looks doubtful if we compare the passion of past resistance to the dimestore half-efforts we see today to change the world.  This is not a pep-talk, however; greater and more embittered renegades have already laid the maps for us and further incitement is neither necessary nor the subject of this article.  The point here is that we all have serious, violent amends to make for what we have done, whether we realize it or not and whether we admit or not: the creation of “the norm.”  This is something so invisible, so insidious, and so disgustingly all pervasive that our attempts to reject it are often doe-eyed and heartbreakingly mediocre.   Perhaps, then, a good cold stare at the real victims of this constantly operating and seemingly invincible plague is in order.

Anyone worthy of breathing on this planet has experienced at one time or another mental and emotional states that can in some way, some how be characterized as, ahem, “unnatural,” or to put it in that deadliest and most laymen of terms, “not normal.” There is a quiet virtue to this, a simplicity that decriminalizes it right away: there is no actual verifiable state of emotional normalcy.  All behavioral and affective dispositions are human creations which vary from one sociocultural context to another.  Health is a notion so perverted by the capitalist hamster wheel that it would take more than five men of genius to define it properly, to articulate it without corruption.  Civilization, that ever burgeoning disease, is the sole reason for all such arbitrary definitions.

As a person who has spent the better part of his life in institutions with people defined, drugged, and herded into gigantic constructs with steel walls, locked bathrooms, windows where the Psychotropic Drug Cartel does better business on the anguish of the disaffected than Pablo Escobar ever could have hoped for, I believe I can speak to this with a certain amount of experiential integrity.  Some of those who I witnessed deteriorate completely (and sometimes die) firsthand were among the most sensitive, creative, and thoughtful individuals I have encountered, and are certainly in my short life’s recollection the closest to me in spirit. 

Institutionalization of the mental health variety is an experience akin to being stripped of one’s clothes, having one’s memory forcibly removed, and one’s name torn away—then being expected to re-grow, far away from home.  Off the top of my head I will ad lib the chemicals my body has been subjected to over prolonged periods in a kind of human guinea pig experiment: haldol, risperdal, abilify, lithium, zyprexa, closaril, zoloft, klonopin, percoset, valium, depakote, wellbutrin, ellavil, addivan, effexor, codeine, ambien, and so on, and so on, and so on some more.  The attendant withdrawals, psychological side effects, and loss of physical control cause an anguish I could never articulate.  Woe to the idiot who watches television and sees a commercial with happy, smiling faces that bear the imprint of a psychotropic drug and believe it. 

Being labelled mentally ill is rather like having one’s genitals mutilated, the very essence of any possible self belief destroyed.  One is no longer, beneath all that formal and polite madness we call everyday “life,” anyone to be taken seriously very much at all.  Patronizing smiles leave a burning imprint in one’s memory because one sees so many of them, despite attempts to appear competent, intelligent, or whatever other imaginary badge of behavioral adequacy this hell of a society promotes at this or that time.  Let me, without going into too much detail, give you a little bit of what I have witnessed in the past five years.

I watched a young woman who wanted nothing more than to appear attractive starve herself to death over the period of a year, without me having the opportunity to say anything to her in between her discharge and my return to the hospital.  As a last elegy, let me say this: she was a sweet girl and she LOVED TO WATCH FASHION AND CELEBRITIES SHOWS ON TELEVISION.

A young man who had a knack for graphic design art, so much so that it appeared to me that he had a touch of genius for visual talent, hung himself using a towel from a handicapped guard rail in the bathroom I shared with him.  This was in the hospital, the “safe environment.” 
       
An older woman who had opted for ECT--electroshock therapy--found that she had lost all ability after the “treatments” to perform medicine.  She had been a doctor formerly, and now felt that her vocation of helping people was no longer a possibility.  This feeling of uselessness, another fiction of our society, led to her later leaping out of a high rise window.  She had two children of her own.

A heroin addict who had been in a program known as STARZ, a young Puerto Rican, was suspected of having smuggled heroin into this very same hospital, something he actually had nothing to do with.  He was removed and overdosed three years later.

An adolescent girl who was stuck to a wheelchair because of her diabetic conditioned also felt very sad at times, sad enough to stop taking her insulin so she would die.  Apparently the doctor in charge decided to try a kind of “Reverse Action” technique, allowing her to do just that.  She went into a coma after about three weeks of wasting away.

And in the last event I will recount because I will never forget it, a middle aged man finally got others to see his self contempt by progressively injuring his face while in the hospital—the end result was him clawing his face to the point where he was barely recognizable.  And this led to his discharge; he made the other patients feel nervous and “unsafe.”