Once upon a time I thought it would be interesting to talk to a doctor about emotional problems. I thought, they would be good because they could listen confidentially and would know ways to direct me that would help me out of the bad feelings I had. I was so young and self-centred I forgot to think about what they were actually thinking. I only thought of my own story.

When you consider what a doctor is thinking while you’re talking, you realised that, if you were to actually hear that, you would be insulted. Because they sit there calling you names. Not nice names, all names about why you’re sick. ‘Psychotic, schizoid features, mania, depressive features… I might be able to include this patient in my thesis. Perhaps I should organise a brain scan; always good to include pictures. Hmm perhaps I can diagnose them bi-polar and give that medication… only twenty more patients to prescribe to and I get a free trip to Bali courtesy of the pharmaceutical company.’
Once you realise what a doctor actually thinks, you want to never have to talk to them while they’re working again, unless it’s about something physical, because even they have physical problems. And there is nothing derogatory about having high blood pressure, or influenza, or cancer. These things can’t always be cured, but they’re just things that happen to the human body. Being diagnosed ‘not of sound mind’, well that means you’re not fit to even speak for yourself. Go to a psychiatrist and expect to walk out sub-human.
Sometimes though, particularly when people are young, they want to talk about things that are going on in their mind and get advice. Medical people are not going to give good advice. They are about prescribing pills. Chemical fixes are what they do. I don’t have a lot of faith in the chemical imbalance theory. There isn’t enough evidence to prove its hypothesis and many people say the chemical treatments make them feel worse, not better. But seeing they are diagnosed not of sound mind, their views are regarded as irrational and without merit.
A psychologist, may use cognitive therapy, art therapy and other forms of talking through things. They’re not medical, they are social workers. Social workers/ psychologists are useful in hospitals where people have to overcome physical things that upset them. But they are not medical personnel. They are about giving directions for social possibilities and overcoming thoughts, guilt, fear, anger, grief and other upsets. However, if you mention that you hear voices, or hallucinate, they will most likely say there’s nothing they can do and recommend you see a psychiatrist. They are legally trying to protect themselves, by doing what they’ve been instructed to do by higher authorities.
 
There are ways of punishing a child for telling lies. But, what if that child can’t help it? Is the way of breaking them out of their belief system via punishment the best method?
I had a mother who got up at night when she heard one of her children in distress and comforted them. I remember seeing ghosts of rabbits floating around when my eyes were wide open and I couldn’t make them go away. They were real in that moment in time. I was having a waking-dream. The way this scary state of mind was stopped was through my mother’s hug and her talking through what was happening, saying things like, ‘It’s all right you’re just having a nightmare. There are no such things as ghosts.’
I was lucky being brought up in a house of atheists, because things like ghosts, to us, were not real. What would a family who believed in ghosts say to a child? Well, they wouldn’t say it’s not real, they’d do something to make the ghost go away. Something that would make the child feel better.
It was guilt that caused the ghosts for me. I thought I hadn’t fed the rabbits enough. But Mum said, ‘It’s not your fault it was a virus and they got sick.’ And my mother broke a belief system that was upsetting me and therefore made the nightmare go away.
Guilt can be a nightmare in itself and people can blame themselves for all sorts of things which aren’t really their fault. This guilt is a bit like depression, where people can get into a belief system that is so self-critical it becomes a nightmare state. People can also become so afraid of something they develop a phobia. These conditions are all instigated by belief systems; states of mind that have somehow manifested into a reality, when it clearly isn’t a logical reality, even if it stems from something that was real enough.
There are also other forms of dream-states that are not easily identifiable, because they’re complicated like dreams, only the person is awake while experiencing them. The person will see the dream reality, feel it, taste it, smell it and hear it. They will also sense the waking reality, because they are awake, but their mind is still operating partially like it is asleep. Why? My guess is the person got stressed and the dream-state was comforting to the individual and preferable to facing reality. If it has become a nightmare and the person still hasn’t woken up from it, it means this: the person has justified the dream-state to such an extent, the dream-state has developed loaded reasons to exist while awake.
The dream-state of another may seem unreasonable and that’s good, because you can then try waking the person up. You do have to go into depth as to what that person’s dream is about so to understand how the dream has the ability of making the person believe in it.
Religion is, to an atheist, mere imagining. Somehow people who are religious have believed in something that an atheist would say, ‘That doesn’t make logical sense.’
People believe in things that are comforting. A reality that is comforting, is a reality a person wishes to stay in. There is no need to wake a person from a reality like that and good luck trying to. But that’s how tough it can be waking a person from a nightmare state. Their nightmare has become like a religion. There must be something in it that makes it a dream enough for them to keep believing in it though.
Consider this: religion is mass hypnotism. The religious belief system is a magical reality based on faith. Religious instruction pertains to a group belief system and enforcing that. Just as you can hypnotise a person into believing something, you can also break them out of that into another belief system. It just takes time and effort.
There are ways of breaking a person out of a belief by beating up on that person. This is how the psychiatric system operates. They use drugs to make people feel chemically straight-jacketed. These drugs have numerous physical side-effects including inhibiting the pleasure receptors in the brain, therefore making that person sad. Psychiatrists also give the person various nasty psychiatric labels. And of course they detain them in a place where they don’t want to be. The person will then be told to keep quiet when they’d rather sing and are given food that isn’t their normal diet, (hospital food is not that nice or healthy and tends to have a repetitive flavour.)
What we have here is a system of social punishment for people whose minds have believed in something that society doesn’t understand. Despite what society thinks about these people that get locked away, that they’re dangerous somehow, they’re not. The provision for detaining someone is supposed to be that they are a potential danger to someone else or themselves. However, how does one determine that? Well, history is a factor. If there has ever been a suicide attempt, automatically they are a danger to themselves, even if that’s not the current case. So, someone who has had a biff with someone else in the past, they’re automatically assumed a danger to someone else, anytime they get into a weird dream-state. So this is how a person that has a history in suicide, gets detained if they start believing that aliens have landed, or ghosts haunt their house, or God speaks to them, or something else that is none of those things but is weird enough to not make sense as a belief system.
I think the current psychiatric legal process is unfair and harsh to people who haven’t done anything wrong. I’d prefer a system that woke up person up by comforting them. A system that treated a person like they mattered. A system that didn’t harm.
I suggest this: family and friends gather like they would for an alcoholic and try and convince the person that they are not awake. Explain how sometimes the mind creates a dream/nightmare while awake and how it manifests. Explain to them also, that their friends and family want the best for them and do not wish them to go to hospital. Hospital should only be a facility for sleep-wakers who become violent in some way, or are threatening to. If a person becomes physically harmful, then physically they get harmed by the hospital. If however, they aren’t, then they can just be talked to and talked out of their belief system. That’s what should be happening. Currently, it isn’t.
I don’t think it is fair, to physically detain and chemically straight-jacket someone just because they’re having strange thoughts. Strange thoughts are not a punishable offence. They are just something that needs to be redirected by intervention services. Intervention should consist of people who are friends and family. If however, a person has no friends or family, there should be a service like that in the community, that is not connected to the hospital psychiatric system. It is social services, rather than blanket medical theories of chemical imbalance, that should be utilised.
Medical services should always be a last resort. They should never be a first option. Diagnosing a person with a medical disorder is not something that should be done lightly. A sleep-waker is not psychotic, unless they are causing harm. That’s my definition. Psychotic pertains to chemical imbalance theories and sleep-waking is cognitive.
Society has to let a person know when behaviour is not okay. But if a person is in a dream-state they’re not deliberately behaving badly. They’re trying to cope with the way their mind is creating an alternate world of parallel thoughts to reality. They will be embarrassed and apologetic, once they’ve woken up. Consider that. You do not blame a person for bleeding when they’ve cut their arm accidentally. A person shouldn’t be blamed for their nightmares. However, as friends and family you should be able to tell your side of things too. Making the person face reality and how they’re perceived can wake them up. Sometimes talking can be harsh. But it’s always better than the physical incarceration and chemical laceration of hospital.
 
How do you separate a person in a dream-state, from someone who is just behaving badly? Well, people who behave badly, don’t care about you. They’ll be demanding of you, they’ll think they can own your time. They’ll try and physically push you around. Now, that is a social problem. They believe that they can do that and no one will stop them. They threaten to harm, they bully and yet this is not treatable by psychiatrists. I think it is possible to treat a bully with psychiatric punishments of incarceration and chemical straight-jackets. Perhaps this would be enough to make the bully realise they can’t keep behaving in the way they have. However, this is not happening, psychiatrists fob bullying off as a social problem instead. So, bullies get treated nicer than people who are in a non-violent dream-state. That isn’t fair.
            Psychiatric care is punishment, for thinking incorrectly. Why not punish those who are harming others? Simply because medical people do not want to have to deal with people who get violent. They want their job to be nice and easy. But police don’t want to deal with bullies either. If they did, prisons would be overcrowded. Prisons are for very harsh crimes. Pushing someone around physically and threatening them, isn’t a big enough crime for the police. The person would have to cause someone a huge physical injury, so they could lay charges.
            Most people believe that people in psychiatric units have committed a crime, or some public offence. They don’t know that hospitals can bring people in for uttering something like, ‘The aliens are after me.’ There are other things people are ignorant about too. They see people who twitch and drool and think that’s schizophrenia. They don’t realise that those things are side-effects of high doses of medication. Most people don’t understand how an individual innocent of any crime, or public offence can be forced to take such medication. They think that person would have to have been charged by a court of law. I’m surprised how ignorant people are. But it’s the newspapers fault. They never print what people who hate psychiatry want to say.
            Is it some kind of offence to criticise the psychiatric system? Would newspapers be sued if they did that? Is it because psychiatric services are part of governmental law? Is it because they don’t want people to be afraid of psychiatric services? Why? People are afraid of police if they’re doing something that could in anyway get them incarcerated. Is it because psychiatric services are meant to help, not just punish?
Belting a child used to be thought of as good for the kid, but, you know, it is physical punishment and so are psychiatric drugs, electro-shock therapy and incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. Call it what you like, psychiatric treatment is punishment not care.