Opening of the Way

We don’t want people to be on prescription or street drugs, especially those prescription drugs which serve no purpose except mood alteration.

No street drugs are very hard to regulate effectively. Often efforts to control have the opposite of the intended effect.

But with prescription drugs, these are being distributed through prescriptions written by the holders of government licenses. With psychiatric drugs, we should be able to cut that off cold.

As far as individuals, patients, clients, survivors, undoubtedly we all have been through horrendous things. But the answer is not drugs.

And no, you don’t want to work with or associate with people who use psych drugs. They are not making the monumental life long effort to be able to live within their own skin. I helped put a guy in our state prison for molesting his daughters, and most of his defense was a ~mental illness~ defense. He let white coats turn his midlife crisis into a ~mental illness~ issue. And from that point on he was afraid to feel his feelings, and afraid to be without his drugs.

I wanted the daughters to sue him. They haven’t. But I think the defendant, now a convict, should be able to sue our mental health system.

I don’t mean to sound like I am shaming individuals, I know people have survived horrendous things, especially familial abuses. But drugs are not the answer, political activism and legal redress are the answer.

People who believe in drugs are, as I have seen, “screwy”. It’s because they don’t want to feel their feelings. So really, best to have no communication with them, to avoid senseless conflict.

Another man I know had a kind of a nervous breakdown, simulated by career collapse. But it is also because he does not believe in feeling his feelings.

So now he is on drugs. People tell him to throw them away. But no. He gives a stereotypical description of a homeless man, as you might see in any large US city. He says that these drugs are the only thing stopping him from becoming like that.

So he goes with the socially functional interpretation. Anyone who is not “socially functional” is ~mentally ill~.

It is impossible to deal with someone like this guy. Again, best strategy is just zero communication. Non-profit he was volunteering for recently 86ed him.

It’s not senseless shaming, it’s just the only practical solution to people who don’t want to feel their feelings, and who are going to try to manage their feelings via drugs.

And Sera, I can see now why you wrote articles to the Boston Globe which really created the impression that the Murphy Bill and its involuntary drugging must be in some cases necessary.