Extract from Openmind issue 125, Jan/Feb 2004 - What price sanity?

Medication has robbed Lisa Barker of some of the best days of her life
What price sanity?

Early in 1996, I took it into my head to throw myself into the Leeds/Liverpool canal. Obviously, with my history of mental illness, this led to my being incarcerated in Highroyds Mental Hospital for what turned out to be a six-week stretch. Looking back on those six weeks, I can honestly say they were the happiest, most exciting six weeks of my life.

For a start, I was not taking the medication. I had been told to take Respiridone, but I wasn’t having any of that and only pretended to take the tablets before spitting them down the toilet. It’s sobering to think that although I was not taking the medication, after six weeks they deemed me sane enough to let me go. Maybe medication is not the panacea it’s made out to be, and we, the mentally ill, can live perfectly well without it?

At first I thought I was in telepath central, but within three days I knew exactly who, what and where I was. I even knew what day it was (a plus when it comes to dealing with psychiatrists). I was, it has to be said, as mad as a snake.

I’d be rapping to great poets and artists, living and dead; passing judgement on death; talking to my telepathic lover; saving creation for the women; living the great creation myths and making a few more up as I went along.

My mind was stimulated, and while no one else would agree with me about my beliefs it didn’t matter – I knew they didn’t, I knew they wouldn’t or couldn’t, and I knew they never would. Within my insanity, I was happy and free and perfectly able to function in ‘their’ world too.

What price sanity? Since that time, I have been forced to take medication and have become suicidally depressed at the loss of my precious belief system. Everyone needs a core of beliefs, whether they are officially sanctioned or
not. And my beliefs have been systematically eroded by the mental health services.

I no longer know who I am and I have no solid foundation for my life. I was a shaman; now I’m just mentally ill. I was living the great myths of creation to heal the planet. Now I think, or sort of think, that it is all delusion. In being forced to conform, my beliefs have been policed to the point where I no longer have any left.

I think back to those blissful six weeks of freedom and think about what I have lost. My eye contact may be a little less shifty now I’m on Modicate, but my life is a hollow parody of what it once was. Beliefs are the most precious thing a human being possesses. Without them, life has no meaning. Maybe in time, mental health services will come to recognise and even celebrate difference. They will see our individual beliefs as something precious to each person, however bizarre they may be, and leave them intact. A good example of this is African Caribbean cultures, where spirituality is regarded as a way of life. Should people in these cultures be normalised to a mechanistic view of the world and given medication because they do not conform?

I believe it is a dangerous and insidious path to class certain beliefs as acceptable and to medicate others away. We are all individuals, with unique beliefs that should be recognised and appreciated – even celebrated – as another expression of who we are and the place we occupy in the world. Once a core belief system is eroded, the poor schizophrenic has to go back and start all over again, night after night after night after night …