Freedom from madness comes from trust. The need to find some one person to believe in. I didn’t put two and two together until I analysed all my episodes: I had turned myself off from people.
I’m not trying to establish a causation here, a chicken before the egg or vice versa, rather a lack of trust feeds into episodes of distress. I feared I couldn’t trust anyone, so I stopped communicating with people, so I was isolated with my thoughts, which worked to show how I could trust no-one.
The first day I met the psychiatric nurse she asked a simple question I didn’t feel I could answer fully. Knowing I couldn’t answer fully—at the time—is indicative of what I needed: someone to help me find the order within me.
My mind grasped for what I could make of—what I could discern from—the feelings, thoughts, images, sounds, sights, impressions, and thoughts-on-thought that tore around and within me. I looked for the one thing I knew I didn’t have and what exactly it was I needed: a reality I could believe in. And to establish a reality I asked for someone to point it out to me, or more, for someone with whom I could establish it: I asked for someone I could speak with, openly and honestly, that I could trust.
I didn’t receive anything from this request. I was forced to speak with doctors who prescribed, and nurses who offered guidance, but I never had anyone who I could establish the meaning of my mind with.
This is the truth of the medical system, or what I imagine is the truth of the many systems available. The system doesn’t exist to aid you in establishing your reality, it exists to quell you, by force if necessary, into accepting the truth as it is for everyone else, but especially as the medical system sees it. It’s a battery, an assault on your madness, never acknowledging that your madness is part of you.
Instead it sees your madness as necrotic flesh, to be excised. Madness is dead skin, threatening to rot all it comes in contact with. Medicine’s desire to is stop the rot, yet it never asks what the initial tear was from. It never asks whether there’s a cause.
This might be valid first aid, an element of triage. Stop the growth that is causing damage. Yet it never goes further than first aid. Once someone is capable of quelling the effect of their trauma then no further action is needed (apparently.) This is the truth throughout the practice of psychiatry, it is the essence of psychiatry: thoughts are not problematic unless they cause problems. A tautology, to a degree, but if a sane person were to have the exact same mind as mine, and it didn’t bring them outside of what is viewed acceptable within society, it wouldn’t be an issue for the psychiatrist.
Psychiatry comes into play when the person can’t deal with their issues, when their issues cause distress. For me—as I found in the moment when the nurse asked me what I needed—it was that I didn’t have anyone I could trust, and more that there was no-one I felt I could speak with. This was never dealt with. Instead of letting me speak, my fear of those I couldn’t speak with was the issue.
Sitting in that apartment with Niamh I did speak, and is it any wonder I felt good in it?
She was a new person. She was someone I had no time to amass evidence against, telling me I couldn’t or shouldn’t trust her. This is part of my illness, where those with time spent with me allow me to their build motives in working against my interests, however this is not the fullness of my issue. Time spent with people builds their complexities, complexities I may not be able to understand and internalise, and so it troubles me. Perhaps that’s another aspect of schizophrenia, learning to deal with incomplete knowing. If I were to speak of those troubles with people—I presume but also know—those people would find me insane. Yet that may be what I need to say, “I am insane, at the moment.” Me facing up to my reality and establishing it as something to contend with, yet that opportunity is never afforded. An incision is placed and extended, an amputation made, cut-off (or more often bludgeoned away) is this madness. It is wrong. And I learn I am wrong. And what I am—at times—is something I should be afraid of, and yet it is somehow separate to what my fears are. And I retreat into madness, again and again.