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Mental Patients' Liberation: Why? How?
Inside the hospital, of course, mental patients are a recognizable
group with a recognizable identity: that of victims in a living
hell. The need to liberate our brothers and sisters on the
inside needs no explanation.
As a long-range solution, mental patient's liberation means
ending all involuntary commitment of law-abiding people, thereby
restoring one of America's most fundamental and most important
promises. But the hospital doors are still locked and you
are still inside. In our consciousness-raising sessions,
we have discussed how we got in, and how we got out, and
we have discovered that all of us got out by learning to tell
the doctors what they wanted to hear. We call it "learning
to shuffle." We discovered, in sharing our experiences,
that when we loudly proclaimed (in the hospital) that we were
not sick and that the doctors should leave us alone, we were rewarded
with forced hypodermic injections of Thorazine and trips to the
seclusion room, but when we learned to say humbly "I was
sick, but with my doctor's help I'm getting well," our imprisonment
neared its end. You will have the satisfaction of
knowing which is truth and which is falsehood, and of knowing
that although they have imprisoned your body, they do not have
your mind.
The problems of the ex-patient are more subtle but no less pressing.
Many ex-patients try to cope with what has happened to them
by pretending that the experience never occurred. However,
because the experience of having once been a mental patient teaches
you to think of yourself as less than human, this is not a satisfactory
solution. People feel emotions. They are justifiably
happy or sad, angry, calm, elated, and so forth. As patients,
however, we were taught to think of ourselves as permanently crippled,
and we tend to react to the normal ups and downs of life as affirmations
of our secret deformity. In addition, society imposes penalties
upon ex-patients which affect you whether or not you acknowledge
your identity. For the rest of your life, you will lie on
applications for jobs, schools, and driver's licenses, and worry
about being found out. Your friends and acquaintances will
be divided into two groups, those who know and those who don't,
and it will always be necessary to watch what you say to the latter.
Ex-patients are full of anger at what has been done to them, but
alone and unorganized this anger is not expressed and is often
turned inward against oneself. Our anger is the fuel
of our movement, and when we come together, acknowledging
our identity to ourselves and to teach other, we will have made
the first and largest step in striking back at our oppressors.
("Mental Patients' Liberation: Why?
How?" was originally distributed in the early 1970s
by Mental Patients' Resistance of Brooklyn, New York.)