It's All Performance Art 79

I don't believe that I was ever mentally ill.  In fact, I have never been mentally ill.  I have never hallucinated, never suffered from paranoia, nor heard voices.  Even if I have wanted at times to harm myself, I was always able to talk myself out of it, without interventions.   Even if I have been incredibly sad and despondent on occasion, there have always been good reasons for it, especially being treated like unwanted crap by others, and I have always recovered from it, without interventions.  If I am still anxious at times, then it could be because my life has always been uncertain and I have been through some very chaotic shit with plenty of free suckerpunches thrown in.  But even if my sleep suffers sometimes, I still get a good night's sleep, say, at least four days of the week. 

I only began manifesting symptoms, otherwise, when I swallowed the claptrap from my psychiatrist that I had PTSD.  This isn't to say that my experiences of child abuse and other horrors didn't leave their mark.  I was vulnerable.  But I also had to live and cope in a society and financial and political system that every day violated and still violates the values that I hold most dear.  Try to make a decent living under those kinds of circumstances.  Go on, try it!  If you really want to live as a Christian in a system based on competition, greed and materialism, then you are simply not going to do very well.  And if you don't have those ugly traits needed to do well in the workforce then, like me, you are simply going to be poor all your life.  It's unavoidable.

And the very arbiters of this kind of sick system have the colossal nerve to presume to diagnose me as sick!  What an insult!

I was really able to get on with my life when I completely repudiated three years ago my mental health diagnosis.  If I am still a bit eccentric, well, so what?  I am a person with creative, spiritual and intellectual gifts, so of course I'm going to be a bit unusual. 

What about the clients I work with, who seem genuinely ill?  I would say that most of them are or have been genuinely ill.  Had I become trapped and enmeshed with the mental health system, I would probably be sick right now.  The mental health treatment and recovery system thrives on stigma.  We owe our jobs to stigma.  And I have dedicated my professional life as a mental health peer support worker to fighting and resisting stigma and doing my due diligence to encourage and empower my clients to empower themselves and become their own persons in their own right, independent of a mental health system that really just wants to keep people sick in order to justify its own existence!