I sent this letter to about a dozen friends and colleagues of mine who do NOT work in mental health fields. These are people I admire who have different focuses in life entirely, but who I think have important things to say in relation to the topic of psychiatry and resisting psychiatry.
Stay tuned for the first interview answers coming from Shel Horowitz, a marketing and publishing leader.
If you know of anyone who is truly outside of the psychiatric survivor movement and does not work in mental health at all, who might like to participate in this project, please have them email me their answers to these questions. Answers may be long or short, but detailed, in depth answers are the most useful.
Hi friends,
Was there ever a time in your life when psychiatry was a consideration?
How did you choose your path instead?
Why are you glad you did?
Bonus question: do you consider yourself a resource for people who want an alternative to the medical model of mental health?
I am doing a series of blog interviews with experts in all different fields who I admire where I will promote your work, write a paragraph or two about how I found it or met you, and link to your website on my blog as well as books or videos that would pertain to my audience. Most of my audience are people who are struggling to come off of or recover from psychiatric drugs that have damaged their health.
The intention of this project is to bring more awareness of alternatives to the Western psychiatric model to a larger audience, so I’m choosing people who already have a fairly large audience and who are interested in social change.
Another goal is to bring more awareness of alternative practitioners and inspiring ways of life to those struggling with damage from psychiatric drugs.
Your answers will be posted on my blog in an interview format along with the promotion of your work.
I ask that if you participate, you share the interview link with your networks on social media and/or your newsletter. The questions I ask are personal as my intention is to normalize the choice most of us make to either call our human experience a mental illness or to understand our suffering and differences (which we all have) in another framework.
If you never encountered the possibility of receiving a psychiatric label, you can write about a time of extreme transformation, awakening, suffering or emergence in your life and whether you feel lucky you chose to see it in a larger spiritual or socio-political or trauma/healing focused paradigm (or whatever framework you did choose or believe).
If you are interested, please respond with your answers to these questions. I am initially putting this call out to a small number of friends, but will make a wider call at some point, depending on what my time, energy and resources allow. If this opportunity doesn’t interest you, no need to respond, but you are welcome to pass this along to people who you think would be a good fit to be interviewed.
My intentions here are not to stigmatize or criticize anyone who has found corporate sponsored psychiatric diagnosis a positive path. I don’t have time to engage in much back and forth or email dialogue, so please, only respond if you want to participate, and please only answer the questions at the top of this note. Thank you so much for your time and who you are in the world!!
Sending many blessings,
love,
Chaya
Hi Chaya, I use a common sense practical paradigm to view my experience. ‘Mental illness is simply a denigrating description, a maddening metaphor, a pejorative psychiatric label for the stresses and strains of a person’s life beginning at conception such as the different timing of environmental risk factors like toxins, infectious diseases during mom’s pregnancy and / or trauma; physical, mental, emotional, sexual ( allostatic overload, Bruce McEwen, neuroscientist ) that a person Unconsciously Reacts To and is simply given a description of that person’s lived stressful experiential life, a ‘ diagnosis ‘ by an unaware, often compassionless pro. So What? ! To continue to call me ‘ mentally ill ‘ is to be obtuse, be ignorant of the facts, the reality, the truth of my experiential life. Life, Love is the ‘ medicine ‘. Psychiatry is a paltry, poor alternative. I was objectified by family, culture, religion. I didn’t adjust ‘normally’ to an insane society, that simple when I became conscious. Always, All the Best Kurt 🙂
Thanks Kurt! 🙂