Katrina's Speakout

When You Are Well, You're Well I am a psychiatrist who last had professional activities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Chaya's Narpa talk

I began to be able to face myself after reading the Preface to The Myth of Mental Illness by Dr. Szasz, born 1920 in Hungary. I could look at what happened to me as problems in living and that these were moral and not medical problems. 

Two security guards and several nurses came at me and attacked me. A doctor came in and shot me in my leg with meds I did not consent to. I sustained in juries to my back, head, face, chest, arms, legs and ankles. They also had help my mouth closed and pinched my nose so I couldn’t breath. 

Oryx Cohen is Director of the the Support Coalition International (SCI)'s Oral History Project. The Project involves collecting stories from psychiatric survivors, consumers, and ex-patients about their experiences in the mental health system: powerful stories of recovery, survival, resistance, and self-determination.

During the 1990s I worked as an outpatient clinician at the ServiceNet facility on Pleasant Street. While I enjoyed my professional contact with folks who came in for counseling support, I resigned the job not only because I found the working conditions oppressive (e.g.- lack of pay for any of the work I did other than the eyeball-to-eyeball contact with clients, and repeated decreases in the hourly wage of clinicians like me, repeated increases in the amount of paperwork required), but also because I found that my ability to interact with clients in meaningful, respectful ways, and to deliver therapeutic services based on relational and ecological theories was severely impaired due to conditions and practices at ServiceNet.

Well that little qualifier was inserted before I started talking because even within the Freedom Center, one of the wonderful things about this group of people is that we are able to tolerate many differences of opinion among one another. Which makes us a model that is markedly different from the medical establishment and the psychiatric establishment, which can only tolerate one model of interpretation.

 

 

 

I have a rather dramatic story of my introduction to the "mental health" system and my recovery from it.

I had a "normal" childhood and adolescence and did not know anything about the "mental health "system.

Back in 1969, in my senior year at UMASS Amherst, I became involved with a man who I thought was the man of my dreams. That belief crumbled when he tried to rape me. I woke up the next morning feeling unusually sensitive and vulnerable, with a pain in the center of my chest.

My experiences with Service Net has been consistently disappointing.