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.

The Trouble with Psychiatric Medication

The Trouble with Psychiatric Medication

By

Gavin Bushe

Psychiatric Survivor

I am not a pharmacologist.  I merely understand that what you put into your body has effects on your body, mind, and soul.  So it is with bio-psychiatric medication.  These are clearly toxic substances that have a nebulous effect on the mind and the emotions.  I can only speak with authority on my own experience so I shall do that here for the record.  Perhaps other readers can share their stories of psychiatric medication to illuminate our growing social body of lived experience and knowledge.

I was first given psychiatric medication as a 16 year old.  I resisted but the psychiatrist Dr. Paula McKay insisted using the recruitment of my mother as a social lever to get me to take them.  The drug was called Sertraline.  I later noticed many unpleasant side-effects and social interactive problems due to nervousness and involuntary motions of my body.  I continued on that drug for many years despite my protests until another doctor decided to give me Zyprexa (Olanzapine).  This is a very powerful sedative that caused weight gain, shaking of the arms, and drowsiness.  I remember slumping over the machines at work due to Zyprexa.

It was in relation to Zyprexa that I undertook my two para-suicides.  It is such a powerful drug  that 30 milligrams will effectively knock out a man.  After I had taken 280 milligrams as an overdose I was knocked out for quite some time.  My only grace in that was waking up to see my mother standing over my weakened body at the hospital.

My relationship to medication is ambiguous.  It is difficult to say whether the drugs are causing a mental health problem or remedying one.  I do know that drastic variations in drug intake is extremely bad for the pill-taker.  Under advisement from an alternative medical practitioner in 2010 I had come off the drugs.  I went cold-turkey.  It was a bad move which dogged me for 10 years until the matter was resolved by an agreement to take a depot injection of haliperidol.  That agreement required my torture at the hands of several bands of psychiatric clinicians who had held me down and forcibly injected me on the numerous occasions that I was involuntarily detained by the State Psychiatric Services.

Today I can only advise not to have anything to do with the State Psychiatric Services in Ireland.  If you are a person with trauma and emotional vulnerability try seeking the help of ANYONE BUT a bio-psychiatrist, e.g. a counsellor, a reflexologist, a naturopath, an acupuncturist, etc.  The best way to deal with psychiatric medication is to not go on them in the first place. But I warn you that once your body has adjusted to taking these toxins you probably will have to endure them always going forward unless you have an intelligent plan to detoxify from them gradually.

The trouble with psychiatric medication is that you don’t know whether your behaviour is your own or is caused by the drugs.  That in itself is a theft from your own mind of self-knowledge.  I urge extreme caution in all affairs to do with psychiatric medication.  Seek advice.  Seek personal safety. Be cautious with psychiatric medication.

In Defence of the Liberty of the Individual in Society Against the Mental Health Act 2001 (Ireland)

In Defence of the Liberty of the Individual in Society Against the Mental Health Act 2001 (Ireland).

By

Gavin Bushe MLIS, B.A. (Hons), Cert.

The Unique Individual.

I am different. We are all different from each other. To live in society is to share your unique signature with others, to live beside them in harmony and mutual purpose in order achieve the goal of community which is a happy life for all concerned.  Here in Ireland we have a law written by Fianna Fáil which threatens the right to be different.  It is called the Mental Health Act 2001.

Would we not all like to live in a brotherhood or a society with others – for good or for bad?  Yes.  Then who will be his brother’s oppresser?  Noone.  The right of difference of the unique individual stands firmly as a jewel of human rights that is to be guarded against the politics of some people.

I have personally been the target of the Mental Health Act 2001 on the 17^th of May 2020.  I was walking in my Islamic Dress.  (It’s called an Ihram, normally used by people on the pilgrimage).  I was travelling to the supermarket when some people from among the community including Brian Leech, candidate for the Solidarity Party, approached me with vain concerns about my mental health status.  They repeatedly asked me was I “alright”, as though I could not discern or speak for myself while rebuking them, and carefully feigned an arrest under the Mental Health Act 2001.  Garda R215 was the arresting officer.  She understands that it was a farce.

I was taken to Tallaght Garda Station where Doctor Moloney asked me two questions before signing me into involuntary detention. I then spent 26 days in involuntary detention in Tallaght Acute Psychiatric Unit.  While there I was group-assaulted twice by clinical staff for refusing to take psychiatric medication via injection.

All of this was the creation of an impersonal legal machinery called the Mental Health Act 2001.

The Revolution and the Liberty of the Individual.

The purpose of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution was to establish the rights and liberties of the individual as against foreign tyranny.  The Unfinished Revolution created an Irish State that was inherited from the foreign tyrants.  Today that State still fundamentally exists within the country.  It is an ominous legacy from 1923.

The point of the politics is to establish a free Ireland.

How can this be achieved under the framework of the Mental Health Act 2001?  It cannot.  When I was sent to the hospital it was a kicking-in of the most reactionary legal structure in the present land.  It must be opposed.

The Problem is The State.

“Where there is a state there is no freedom, and where there will be freedom there will be no state”, said Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin).  Lenin would say, “Smash the State”.  The State has no place here except as a Welfare State.  We must rally round each other and reflect on what this represents to us to have a law like the Mental Health Act 2001.  It is a wooden mallet that hovers over our heads.

The State is the gravest threat to the liberty and individual personhood of the human being.  When acting like a machine it depersonalises and destroys.  It makes bullies out of human beings.  It makes victims out of human beings.  The ultimate end must be the Repeal of the Mental Health Act 2001.

Only when the Mental Health Act 2001 is repealed, particularly in its social control mechanisms, will we be able to enjoy free mental health.  Until then we are prisoners of the State that empowers some and victimises certain individuals who for whatever reasons are brought under its gaze.  The law is a basilisk.  The law is a cockatrice.  The law is a medusa.  It turns you to stone as its victim. It must be repealed.

Community Advocates are Necessary.

Pending the repeal of the Mental Health Act 2001, mandatory advocates must be assigned to every person who is detained under the law.  I have witnessed dozens of community members who have been left to lady luck for their human rights at the hospital: people who are detained on an ongoing and perhaps indefinite period of time while the mental health machine keeps turning and churning on.

The best defence for us is to have an advocate assigned to each detainee.  The Irish Advocacy Network (IAN) already exists.  It must immediately be funded and expanded so that it can do the job it was created for.  It was the brainchild of Paddy MacGowan.  Paddy was detained for 10 years within the system before he got out.  His story is an immense one.  He set-up the Irish Advocacy Network (IAN).  Now it must be funded and expanded. Sallynoggin College of Further Education (SCFE) provides a course in “Information, Advice, and Advocacy Practice”.  It is a QQI Level 6 course designed for the purpose I mentioned.  The College is based in Dun Laoghaire.

The Law Must be Voluntary.

The entire idea of a republic is to create more freedom than it takes away.  Only right-wing actors confuse the moral problem by making difference a problem.  The Mental Health Act 2001 has got to go.  In its place we must have a system of mental health care that is attractive not coercive.  Only when people will be attracted to a service can it really start to aid them.  Currently the service is undermined by its domineering coercive nature.

I envisage a time when people involved in mental health will breathe a relief from the individualist slaughter that they have been engaged in – and they must know it.  A fully voluntary service could help others whose mental health has deteriorated.  It could give them mental breathing space.  No forced medications.  No forced Electroshock.  No atrocities against the unique individual with his/her own unique DNA and human fingerprint. 

I will be different. 

Gavin Bushe

Islam and Mental Health

Islam and Mental Health

By

Gavin AbdulHamid Bushe

Mental Health is a growing concern among people in the Western World.  It is estimated that one-in-four people will at some stage in their lives suffer from a mental health problem.  There are many possible ways to address mental health concerns and the chief among them in the West is called Psychiatry, of which the dominant medical model utilises pharmaceuticals to remedy the mental health problems.  As a man diagnosed by psychiatry since 1995 I have not found the Psychiatric approach helpful.  Rather, since converting to Islam in 2006 I have been able to greatly improve my mental health via its practice.  I will now briefly outline in simple terms why Islam is excellent for improving one’s mental health.

Self-Care Regime

Islam in the broadest sense is a complete way of life.  However in relation to mental health in particular it is a system of personal self-care.  The main benefit of Islamic personal self-care is that it is completely free-of-charge whereas Psychiatric Services cost money and time of other people.  Once a person learns the basic 5 Pillars of Islam he or she is then able to gain the mental health benefits of its daily practice.  Islam assumes at a bare minimum clothing, water, and basic food.  Indeed I was able to practice Islam while I was in a state of homelessness.


The first major way that Islam improves mental health is through belief in Divine Mercy.  This is established through the testimony of faith (Shahada).  Islam understands that the universe is ruled by One Single Omnipotent God who is Entirely Merciful, Especially Merciful.  Therefore Islam provides hope to its practitioners.  Through Islam I was able to overcome the Limbo of living in a homeless shelter for 20 months because my faith gave me the ability to endure marginalisation and other challenges at that time.  There are many suicides in the world we live in and hope and faith are immensely important to people who fall into despair during the trials of life on Earth.  Belief in Allah gives a practitioner of Islam a source of hope to turn to in times of crisis.

The second way that Islam promotes mental health is through its practice of 5 times daily prayer.  The requirement for this prayer is ritual bathing with water or ablution (Wudu).  Before each prayer the practitioner must wash his or her hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, scalp, ears, and feet.  This promotes cleanliness and personal hygiene which protects against bacteria and is good skin-care.  Brushing of teeth before prayer is good for oral-hygiene.  This practice of being clean and hygienic makes a human being feel good about themselves.

During the prayer the practitioner recites The Holy Qur’an sometimes aloud and sometimes within himself.  This is good for keeping the mind strong due to the cognitive articulation required and it promotes mental resilience.  The minds of many people suffering from mental health problems are structurally weakened by trauma, and reciting The Holy Qur’an reinforces the mind’s abilities to cognate and structure thoughts through mental precision and acuity.

The body movements of the ritual prayer are good for suppleness of the physique.  Since the mind and the body are related, the improvement in the flexibility and stretching of muscles of the practitioner due to prayer aids mental wellness by easing tension.  It also helps with joints which makes movement easier.

Reciting the Call-to-Prayer (Adhan) is good for improving mood and keeps away evil spirits (Jinn) who can cause mental distress.  The Call-to-Prayer causes Jinn to run away from the area in which it is announced.  This is very beneficial to people who have been troubled and traumatised by these spirits and alien entities.

The Islamic diet precludes harmful foods such as alcohol that can harm the mind.  Islam forbids narcotics which are clearly dangerous to the human mind and can ruin a person’s entire life.  Islam also forbids consuming blood from animals such as in black pudding or certain sausages, etc. because it is an impure substance containing many chemicals from the animals’ bodies.  Islam additionally discourages eating to excess which can cause weight-associated problems.  Islam encourages the eating of pure foods such as dates and milk, fruits, nuts, and honey, Zamzam water from Mecca which is a blessed spring from Allah to his servant Hajar the wife of Prophet Abraham (Peace be upon him); also halal meat which is good for humans.

Social-Care Regime

Mental Health is also psycho-social.  The rules of Islam are able to protect its practitioners from evil in society through rules such as marriage, modesty in dress, community charity (Zakat) which form the foundation of good social relations between members of society.  The Holy Qur’an is a guidance in 114 Chapters (Surahs) and combined with the practices (Sunna) of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings of Allah be upon him) provides excellent insights to the practitioner of Islam.  These insights can clear-up many mental confusions that people can suffer from.

The Islamic month of Ramadan brings people together in community which counters social exclusion which is a major factor in mental health problems.  The practitioners of Islam fast by abstaining from needs and wants for 30 full days each year.  This fasting (Saum) increases resilience, a core concept in mental health.

Islam encourages the engaging in science and learning and this provides a strong thinking ability for the practitioners.  Education enhances intrapersonal development by providing personal growth and development.  Practitioners of Islam are encouraged not to waste too much of their time on parties and entertainments.  Rather they are to fulfil their time on Earth according to a test before being judged after death.  This places life in a certain perspective that tends to foster a healthy attitude to living.  The epitome of this attitude can be practiced on the Hajj Pilgrimage in Mecca.  This is a gigantic social ritual which brings people from all over the globe together in one place for approximately two weeks each year.  The pilgrimage to Mecca promotes patience, wisdom through fear of Allah, and social solidarity.  These are qualities that help overcome problems due to isolation, fear of environment, and the ups-and-downs of real life.

Islam demands struggle against the self (Jihad Al-Akbar – Greater Struggle) and this is the best way to overcome personal problems.  It is what a psychotherapist would call “working on yourself”.  Ultimately Islam is designed to achieve peace of mind through submission to the Will of Allah.  That is a more excellent and genuine peace in my opinion that the sedation caused by pharmaceuticals.

 

In summary Islam aids Mental Health by providing a Divinely-Constructed system of life for the benefit of human beings.  It is free to use and all humanity is invited to join the Islamic Straight Path.