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My Unchosen Journey Through Mental Illness
by Clover Smith
I would never have chosen my journey into mental illness and down into the bottomless pit of hopeless, helpless, homicidal and suicidal terror and despair. No one does. Only a few make it back out alive. I am one of these. My life is now above and beyond my wildest dreams. For, although my spirit's detour through an agonized, deadly struggle was unchosen, my lived experience through the cause, the exacerbation of psychiatry, and the cure is what gives great usefulness and joy to my life now.
The silver lining of any experience is that God can change darkness into a light for others to follow out of darkness. The purpose of all life is to gloriously fulfill its potential. Every person is born equally worthy, a spiritual being with a physical body, a child of God and a child of man. Every person is born dependent on others to fulfill their vital physical and psychological human needs. Just as food, water, and air are vital human needs, so, also, are love, truth, and unity.
The humans normal behavior is love, truth, and unity with all creation. Abnormal behavior is the natural reaction to an abnormal environmental. In direct ratio to sensitivity and lack of vital nurturing needs the child becomes separated from his loving relationship with self, others, and God, and sickens, even unto death. Passed down from generation to generation, naivete and lack of psychological nurturing allows the germs of fear, its mutant forms, and delusional concepts to stifle further mental development.
Mental illnesses are the dysfunctional syndromes of fear/grief emotions, thoughts, and behaviors automatically reacting to present and/or past unresolved, traumatic stress. Severe, persistent traumatic stress activates the survival mechanism of flight in innate pacifists and fight in innate aggressors. The flight syndrome occurs in two stages. The first stage, called autism is the withdrawal into the love and beauty of fantasy friends in early childhood. The second stage is activated when the teenager, again unnurtured, slides into the delusional hierarchy syndrome of inferiority with retaliatory blaming and injuring of oneself. These are called mental illnesses. The delusional hierarchy syndrome of superiority with the bully retaliatory blaming and injuring of others produced by the fight mechanism is usually not.
Lacking the required nurturing to become psychologically independent, the superiors and inferiors become controller and controlled co-dependents, each dependent on the other for their delusional value. The superiors exploit others for their own good and feed their egos on the seduction of power, oppressive control, and tantalizing profit. The inferiors, valuing themselves by how they are treated, live in oppressive fear endeavoring to placate their superiors and be treated nice.
Co-dependencies can be home-grown domestic violence or state-sponsored, terrorist enforced dependency; master and slave, Nazi and Jew, psychiatrist and mentally ill are co-dependency examples. The arrogant, grandiosity gods of the Mental Health System, blessed with omnipotent power and use of deadly force by the state, grasp human victims in capricious hands and play with their brains.
I was born a highly intelligent, idealistic, passionate, creative, gentle, sensitive, and steel-willed perfectionist. These form the ecstasies and optimism of the innate pacifist. These are the high risk, superior characteristics that enabled me, a fearful child looking out at a neglectful world, to create an autistic fantasy world of loving, animated friends providing the love and joy needed to survive.
I entered my teens and my maturing body called to the flesh and bone of real people. I turned my eyes from my outgrown, fantasy world and stood waiting out in the world of people for someone to love me. Doing my duty as I was supposed to do, in stoic, growing grief of not being loved, I graduated valedictorian from high school.
Collapsing from the grief of not being loved, my A's of high school fell to failure in college. I was committed to a psychiatric facility. "Oh, yes," I thought, "they are the talking doctors who help people! Oh, yes, I need help! They will love me and tell me all about the world so I can be a person like everybody else!"
Psychiatrists, exposing their open contempt for people, call themselves doctors yet practice violation of the two most vital clauses of the Hippocratic Oath: the directive to First Do No Harm! and the sworn duty to treat in the patient's interest rather than some third party agenda. I had became one of the labeled mentally ill half of the co-dependency.
Reeling from my head injure and running for my life, I escaped after four Electric Convulsion Terrors. Just as after any horror too horrible to be true, by the next day I had hysterical amnesia from the horror of getting my brains knocked out with electricity too horrible to be real. In deep psychological shock, I remained in a state of terror undulating underneath my hysterical laughter that psychiatry calls alleviated depression.
The flashbacks started nine years later. One morning, 13 years later, I was engulfed in the smell of camphor, the oil they had smeared on my temples so the burn would not show on the outside, and exploded into homicidal and suicidal terror and despair. I was recommitted to a new place. I fearfully hoped they would help me. They forced drugs on me by hypo until, addicted, I took them.
Whether legal or illegal, drugs that target the brain are devastating to both mind and body. Psychiatrists' chemical warfare stoned my thoughts and emotions, usurped any sense of self, and eliminated any reason for living. No living organism can endure forever in agony.
A year and a half later, I was experiencing the expected cycles of hopelessness and helplessness with homicidal and suicidal urges and blackout drug rages. I have scars on my body I have no idea how I got. Some people being tortured, maimed, and killed by psychiatry, do kill others. More kill themselves to escape the agony of psychiatry. Most die from the physical devastation of the drugs. Innately, a very gentle person, I did not injure anyone else, but at least four times I became a danger to others, one a child.
Anyone when being killed, especially in a drug induced rage, might blindly strike out at someone within reach. It is superiors, however, who routinely retaliate against the abnormal world of their childhood by injuring others and inferiors who retaliate against a torturing, maiming, and killing world by injuring themselves.
Before psychiatry, I had been collapsing from the grief of not being loved. Psychiatry labeled me a non-person, worthless thing, needing to die. If spoken to it was with contempt; if touched it was with cruelty. My label progressed from schizophrenic to paranoid schizophrenic, to the hysterical death throes of schizo-affective disorder.
Hating people for hating me and wanting me dead, and hating myself most of all for being the hated vile thing that everyone hated and wanted dead, I cut myself up, stabbed myself, overdosed on drugs, walked through traffic, grabbed for policemen's guns, and got into a car with a stranger and asked him to kill me.
Sometimes in-between, sometimes the burns extending halfway up my arm, I put out my cigarettes on the back of my left hand. Real doctors in real hospitals, in emergency rooms, intensive care, and operating rooms, from both the physical drug damage and suicide attempts, saved my life over...and over...again and...again.
My sickened psychiatric-drugged body even got things wrong with it that people don't even get wrong with their body. For instance, the T.D.'s, (tardive dyskinesia) is brain lesions caused by psychiatrists drugs causing uncontrollable, sometimes violent muscle movements, (a condition they made fun of).
Pill-head = Dead-head = Dead. Quit Using or Die. Sometime in-between, the wispy aura of me twisted through the fog to the surface. I called the current psychiatrist, I said, "What do psychiatrists think in their head, my mind is cured when my body is dead!" I slammed the phone down and never swallowed psychiatrists' drugs again.
Again hospitalized in a real hospital, I was gravely ill with delirium jerkings (the D.T.'s so violent my body and limbs jerked instead of trembled) and grand-mal seizures from psychiatric drug withdrawal. I had taken the first step toward wellness.
After 31 years of psychiatric persecution, physically, mentally, and emotionally devastated, I was, incredibly, still alive. I had been committed to psychiatric prisons about 50 times, locked up over 7 years, and admitted into real hospitals about 20 times. My emergency room visits extended into the hundreds. The American taxpayer had paid about a million dollars to psychiatry to subjugate me unto death.
Then one April day a male nurse in an emergency room said to me, "Go to Alcoholics Anonymous; they teach people how to get well there." I went. You can get well; we will help you. are the most beautiful words a body-limb-jerking dying person can ever hear.
I was no longer homicidal or suicidal after my first meeting for they gave me hope and would help me. People can only give what they have been given and have to give. People with fear and its mutant forms gave me fear and its mutant forms as they had been given. People with love, truth, and unity now gave me the cognitive/spiritual healing of those.
Within six months, with cognitive and spiritual healing, I had been taught the self-help how-to of self-examination, self-knowledge, self-healing and self-discipline. I was no longer a victim! I was an overcomer and a victor. They had given me the gift of my real self; how other people treated me or thought about me would no longer have defining power over me. My potential to reflect Gods spiritual laws was fulfilled, and my relationship of love with myself, others, and God was restored. I carried within me the happiness of being an equally worthy child-of-God. I had become a psychological adult.
Just as there are physical laws, universal, changeless, timeless, there are psychological laws universal, changeless, and timeless. An airplane does not fly by breaking the law of gravity, it flies with the higher laws of aerodynamics. Humans do not change from their senses-controlled, automatic-reaction state by breaking the law of geese begetting geese, goats begetting goats, and fear begetting fear and its mutant forms, people change with the higher laws of spiritual power.
Gods unconditional love, truth, and unity has the divine power to fulfill the human potential and transcend human nature. In the flood of the living waters the human is reborn into the spiritual nature, the relationship of love with self, others, and God is restored and the child-of-man changes into the child-of-God spiritual being that everyone really is.
Just as the three physical stages of baby, child, and adult are easily identifiable so are the three psychological stages. The psychological baby has an intuitive spiritual relationship of love with self, others, and God with senses-controlled automatic-reaction imagery openly susceptible to the environmental germs of fear and its mutant forms. The psychological child acquires a communicative language of words, stream of conscious thoughts and the naive, hierarchy, and retaliatory tunnel-vision concepts while still retaining the senses-controlled automatic reactions and open susceptibility to the environmental germs of fear and its mutant forms.
No one is ever cured of being human; the potential of the human is to perceive the full picture of being an equally worthy child-of-God like everyone else, maintain an immunity to fear and its mutant forms, and grow the fruits of the spirit, making spiritual progress, rather than attaining spiritual perfection. Embracing acceptance and forgiveness of ones self and others, the psychological adult has grown from the senses-controlled automatic-reactions of the superior or inferior delusional concepts of the psychological child and acquired the free will, spirit-directed ability to choose. Having a conscious awareness of the presence of God, the psychological adult chooses to reflect Gods principles of love, truth, and unity in all affairs, choosing to make amends for past mistakes and quickly acknowledge and amend new errors, choosing to love and serve God by loving and serving others as oneself.
The difference between being the non-person, worthless thing that psychiatry told me I was and being the equally worthy child-of-God that people of love and truth knew I was, does make all the difference in the world. The first is an agonized struggle to survive in a man-made hellhole, the second is the joyous walking in serendipity and living in God's heaven on earth.
I am now one of the most blessed of people. My autobiography, Escape from Psychiatry, is giving hope to others. I am Founder & Director of WELCOME WORLD, INC. a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization Dedicated to Self-Recovery: A Self-Help Indoor/Outdoor Flea Market & PEERS UNIVERSAL, a Twelve Step, Spiritual/Cognitive Healing Drop-In & 1 bed Residential Treatment Alternative to Self-Destructive Brain-Damaging/Co-Dependency Psychiatry. We are currently in a fund drive for increased personal and capital improvements to expand our treatment facilities.
Please phone or write. I do hope to hear from you.
Advocating Healing for All,
Clover Smith
Psychiatric Survivor / Overcomer / Victor
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Clover Smith, Director
Welcome World, Inc.
P.O. Box 116
Ignacio, CO 81137 USA
Phone: (970) 563-4433
E-mail Clover Smith
Website: http://www.welcomeworld.org
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