The Psychiatric Archipelago

The Psychiatric Archipelago

By

Gavin Bushe

Psychiatric Survivor

All credit to the director Ken Loach who in his film, “The Wind the Shakes the Barley” clearly explained that while Ireland had gained her freedom at the beginning of the 20^th Century she had inherited a British State without the British, that oppressed the natives in similar ways.  One of those ways is the system of social control and the law that the British left behind.

By 2001 that law had become the Mental Health Act which was signed into effect by Micheal Martin TD who went on to become Taoiseach in 2020.  He was pivotal in modernising the Irish Psychiatric System which in its spread of “approved detention centres” under the auspices of the Mental Health Commission resembled a scattering of internal exiles just like a Solzhenitsyn archipelago.  What is different between Solzhenitsyn’s horror story and ours by the turn of the 21^st Century?  Perhaps only the quality of the food is better and the ambient temperature of the buildings is humane.

I first entered the archipelago in my late teens.  I was sent to St. Lomans Psychiatric Facility.  It was an ominous large building with snaky corridors and a dark atmosphere.  My first solid memory of the place was that of a man lying on his back in the middle of a hall.  I asked myself, “Why is there a man of senior age lying in the middle of the corridor?” The answer that came to me was that it is probably better that you don’t ask too many questions in a place like this.  As I entered the psychiatric ward where I was due to stay for some time my parents left me at the entrance which is sealed by a huge iron door like something out of a submarine.  My father told me it had a code but I didn’t verify his statement.

So I was ushered into a psychiatric ward in St. Lomans in 1998.  I was surrounded by dozens of people who seemed to be disoriented.  There was an atmosphere of latent violence in the shuffling of some of the apparently disturbed patients.  People found it hard to sleep.  I left my bed to complain to the night staff but they simply told me to return to it.  I made a determination to become a vegetarian that night in order to improve my karma in the place.  To this day I am now a vegan.

The weeks I spent in St. Lomans were surreal.  The place is a death trap for a person’s social success.  Noone really wants to know a person who has stayed at St. Lomans.  However many of the people were tragic human beings who had little social contacts and desired only the quality of life that oblivious neighbours in wider Dublin took for granted.  I designed to get out of the cul-de-sac as quickly as possible.  I enrolled in a FÁS course in computer programming in Finglas.  I would have been very good at the course except that the pills which the Psychiatric Unit gave me each night put me to sleep for the first 2.5 hours of the lessons each morning in class.  They are somniferous.

The Psychiatric Unit eventually released me after some time with a commitment to being examined by a number of experts in forensic psychiatry who eventually gave me the “all clear”.  Apparently I was suffering from psychosis.  The doctor knew this because his eyes lit up when I had told him that I had religious experiences.  I hear voices and see ghosts.  In the language of the religion that I was later to adopt, Islam, I have had interactions with the Jinn.

The system of psychiatry then went on to make me its permanent subject for the next 20+ years.  Through over 15 incarcerations I was monitored and socially-controlled by a machine of mental health experts who rarely did anything to assist me and always did something to constrain me.  I met dozens of other people who had similar views to mine in the Critical Voices Network.  I also met institutionalised people who thought most highly of the system.  It is remarkable how some people come to revere their oppressors.

Across my time in the system I always thought that the dark and sinister spectre of violence that the psychiatrists promised was a blackening upon any good that their souls attempted to achieve for us service users.  Even recently I noted a chill in the air during the otherwise benign exercises that we do in the services due to the constant threat of physical assault that looms over the services like a shadow.  They attacked me twice in my last stay in order to give me the drugs that are meant for me. The psychiatric workers are probably deranged on some fundamental level that they can conduct themselves appropriately in their psycho-obtuse denial of the omnipresent oppression that is their bread-and-butter and career path.  Even today, the 30^th of June 2020, I am having great trouble in trying to wrench from them any answer to 9 complaints that I made while being unjustly detained and assaulted for a 26 day period in May/June 2020.

The denizens of the Psychiatric Archipelago of Ireland don’t like being challenged on their supposition that they are there to help you. No.  They are there to control the surplus population of Ireland but, perhaps, that surplus might one day want more for itself than to be swept under the rug of Irish Bourgeois Workers’ society…!?

O how little the Irish know or are prepared to admit about their dark underbelly of the Irish Psychiatric Archipelago.