Dissidence

So I’ve got a story to tell about psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. I suppose I should start at the beginning. When I was about eight years old, I was in foster care and I tried to commit suicide. I was physically restrained by my then foster parents before being sedated and strapped to a gurney as I was whisked away to the hospital. It was determined that I had bipolar disorder. I have been on many different medications since. Now, I do not start this way as an attempt to garner pity from any prospective readers. I started this way to provide introductory context. As I attended many forms of therapy throughout the next twenty years of my life, I came to realize that I likely did not have any mental illnesses at all aside from Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Throughout my “treatment”, any attempts to communicate trauma were deflected and determined by the “professionals” to be nothing more than psychotic attempts to gain attention. I was consistently invalidated by those paid to treat an illness that actually wasn’t present. In order to label me, they spoonfed me by asking if I had trouble sleeping. Of course I did! I’d been shown many times that I could not trust my environment or my “guardians.” They also asked me if I ever “felt on top of the world, like I had superpowers.” What eight year old didn’t imagine they had superpowers? Add to that the feeling of overwhelming powerlessness I felt in my life and, of course, as a child, I would use my imagination to cope. It is my opinion that this spoon-feeding was purposeful and predatory. The psychiatric industrial complex had dollar signs in their eyes. They saw an opportunity to exploit my trauma by painting it as a mental illness they could medicate and have continued to do so into the present. The purpose of this series in the blog will be to tell my story in the hopes of reaching others that have been exploited by this predatory industry. I intend to let my people know they are not alone and that, by standing together and putting our truth out there, maybe we can use awareness to create change.