Living With Trauma: The Healers, 17

Those of you who have been faithfully reading my posts in this series (and if you haven't been reading, then I trust that you will have a very good and persuasive excuse. Too busy doesn't cut it, by the way.) might be wondering, as I am, about one little flaw in my argument. How do people who are living with trauma, not yet recovered, ill and not functioning much better than a smear on a bedsheet, how can those sick and disabled people possibly get their lives together enough so that they can offer any practical help or service to the rest of us? The answer is brutal and honest: some of us are never going to be able to do it. Some are going to be so permanently destroyed and incapacitated, not just by illness, but by stigma and the mental health system to move much beyond being able to bathe, clothe and feed themselves, if that. This is a small portion of the diagnosed population and I don't think they represent most who are on their way to recovery. To fully appreciate this, just consider what one has to go through before getting landed with a diagnosis: child-abuse, no support or guidance when the earliest symptoms begin to manifest, no guidance towards better self-knowledge, a culture of prejudice, fear and stigma, social isolation, rejection and bullying. There are many circumstances and variables. Plus, in order to realistically come to terms with mental illness, mental health and mental wellness, lots of introspection is required and we do not live in a culture that fosters or favours introspection. This is a very extroverted culture that we are living in, as introversion and introspection do nothing to keep the manic wheel of capitalism turning and grinding. This shallow, materialistic, consumerist culture of narcissism leaves no room for real personal growth, and only those concepts of spirituality (meditation classes and yoga on demand) that can be successfully marketed to the masses are going to be considered here. There are no rites of passage for adolescents who find themselves held hostage by audial or visual hallucinations, nor for those whose extremes of agony and ecstasy could channel the most amazing creative genius and energy had there been people and traditions to help guide them effectively through the maelstrom. As a community we are vastly too fragmented and scattered and absorbed in our own self-interest to be able to, or care, to provide one another the kind of care, mentorship and friendship that we all need and all have a right to in order to really flourish in our humanity. What we have instead is a society that is hobbled by fear and neurosis and bigotry. Our mental health system simply stigmatizes those in its care, because everyone is too busy and too frightened by the shadows and chimeras of madness to really want to wade too deep into those waters, but wade deep we must if we are to provide a culture of healing, wellness and wholeness. In my own experience, I got off rather well, but I long showed symptoms of trauma without the benefit of diagnosis or of help, because help was so difficult to source. Had therapeutic interventions occurred when I was a child being abused by family members and bullied by my peers then perhaps my life might have taken rather a different direction, and so it goes with all of us. We are still not sufficiently oriented towards compassion, love and kindness in order to offer therapeutic help that is going to be anything other than a Band-Aid. We have come a long way in our methods of mental health care since the infernos that were mental asylums in past centuries. If you were wealthy you could access a psychotherapist. If you were poor, it would be a brutish and very short existence inside the madhouse. I think now that we are getting slowly beyond the medical model that we are beginning to see more inroads of progress: self-empowerment, for example. I am still concerned about what I see to be an overreliance upon medications, and this tendency of mental health practitioners to pathologize any normal human behaviour or reaction that they happen to find unpleasant coming from a client or patient that they dislike or feel personally threatened by. We might also consider one little detail: just as there will always be those mental health consumers who might never recover, there are also those CEO's and corporate douchebags who will never recover from their particular psychopathology: sociopathic narcissism and empathy-deficit disorder.