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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <a
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href="https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/08/psychiatric-survivors-reflect-serotonin-study/">madinamerica.com</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">Loss, Grief, and Betrayal: Psychiatric
Survivors Reflect on the Impact of New Serotonin Study - Mad
In America</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Karin Jervert</div>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">20-25 minutes</div>
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<p><span>L</span>oss, grief, and a sense of betrayal are
felt deeply by many who have been affected by the myth
of the chemical imbalance—a myth given so much attention
over so many decades that it became the most pervasive
way we understood emotional suffering. The myth of the
chemical imbalance became so powerful that it overcame
the truths of the human condition itself.</p>
<p>With the recent publication of the Moncrieff et al
study, which reviewed decades of research, the chemical
imbalance myth was shown to have no support in
scientific evidence. The theory of a chemical imbalance
is a myth, and has always been a myth.</p>
<p>As psychiatric survivors, we—Karin Jervert and Marnie
Wedlake—were inspired by the paper and the attention it
gained. Thinking about all those who are now realizing
they have been lied to by doctors, family, and friends,
we took some time to look back on what it felt like when
we came to that realization. We hope it will help those
going through the endless layers of anger, grief, and
loss after learning of this betrayal.<strong> </strong></p>
<figure id="attachment_236062"
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-236062"
class="wp-caption"><img
src="https://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Karin-Marnie-image-sized.jpg"
alt="" class="moz-reader-block-img" width="892"
height="500"><figcaption
id="caption-attachment-236062" class="wp-caption-text">A
collaborative art piece by Marnie and Karin. A drawing
of the solitary cell Karin was in days after 9/11/2001
overlayed onto a photograph of the window in the room
Marnie spent 333 days in, the longest of her inpatient
stays at the London Psychiatric Hospital during the
early 1990s.</figcaption></figure>
<h5><strong>What do those in power do when a significant
weapon of control, like the chemical imbalance theory,
is deconstructed and decommissioned? </strong></h5>
<p><em>Karin:</em> The chemical imbalance theory has
served a very real purpose of social control.</p>
<p>So, it’s really important that we realize where we are
as a people right now. At its root, this is a public
conversation about human suffering. With the serotonin
theory of depression finally being put to rest and the
biomedical model in question on a wider scale, it is
open hunting season for a new narrative around why we
suffer.</p>
<p>Who else will take the reins of public opinion and use
it to their advantage? So many people are realizing the
massive harm that has been done to them and their loved
ones, and we should be watching for anyone sowing more
discord rather than encouraging the very careful and
purposeful healing that needs to be done here.</p>
<p>The biomedical model, of which the serotonin theory of
depression is a part, has always been best at two things
in Western society. One of those things is
self-blame—drawing the external circumstances of
systemic oppression, in all its forms, into our own
bodies so we would ignore the ways the system we existed
in failed us.</p>
<p>Secondly, it was and still is such an effective way to
make a profit from taking a group of discontented people
suffering under oppressive systems and shut them up—pile
on the stigma, and put them away.</p>
<p><em>Marnie:</em> Psychiatry may admit to not knowing
what causes “mental illness.” Psychiatry may profess
dedication to finding what causes “mental illness,” but
only if these “causes” align with the heavily favoured
biomedical narrative. Too often, suggestions of anything
that might be causal which do not align with the
biomedical narrative are met with venom and vitriol.
This is not scientific inquiry. By its demonstration,
psychiatry is not doing research to find the cause of
mental illness.</p>
<p>Psychiatry is doing research to confirm the narrative
needed to legitimize its existence. Survivors are left
wondering, where are our voices in this quest to find
the cause? How is it that an entire sub-specialty of
medicine, aided and abetted by all of its secondary
players, can be deaf to the voices of those of us who
say we have been harmed by our time in their systems of
care? Simply stated, our experiences do not fit in their
story.</p>
<h5><strong>How do we live with the constant fear of being
ourselves after being involuntarily detained or
treated by psychiatry, an industry that can coerce,
gaslight, inflict violence, traumatize, and chemically
restrain a person at any moment for any reason?</strong></h5>
<p><em>Karin:</em> The trauma of being put away for what
we term as psychiatric experiences, without any say in
your care, left me knowing one thing more than anything
else in this life. <em>The cruelty of others is
immeasurable and can never be underestimated.
Especially those who say they care. </em></p>
<p>Can you imagine? This is what I walk in the world with
every day since I was 21. It is not true. The opposite
could be and is often just as true. But because of the
treatment I experienced and the betrayals of doctors, my
family and friends, this is what I know better than
anything else. I also know I am not free. I have a note
on my medical records that makes me less free. If
freedom is a real thing, I am less free because I cannot
get angry, sad, or frustrated. I cannot call out anyone
with power over me or be myself for fear of retribution
in the form of incarceration in a psychiatric
institution.</p>
<p>I am even afraid being a queer woman with tattoos.
Because that seems one more way this power dynamic could
be used to put me away on a hair trigger. This fear is
not negligible, it is not dismissable. It is real.</p>
<p>The thing to keep in mind, for those who have learned
about the Moncrieff et al study, is that when you go to
your doctor to say, “so, I don’t have a chemical
imbalance…?” Please be prepared for the gaslighting that
will ensue. There are resources for meeting with your
doctor from the organizations we mention below.</p>
<p><em>Marnie:</em> Being deeply entrenched in the system
as a patient was, for me, a prolonged period of
assimilation and indoctrination. How I was supposed to
think about and understand my thoughts, my feelings, my
self—all of this was dictated to me by those who were in
charge of my care. Accepting their authority, without
question, was expected. In this regard, there was no
choice but to accept the biomedical narrative, and what
that narrative meant for me.</p>
<p>The brutality of coercion, especially on the inpatient
units, was stealthy, not visible to outsiders. Orders
were given. Consent was not informed. Don’t ask, don’t
tell. Looking back, I see that so much, that was so
wrong, was dictated to us, as patients in a psych
hospital. We were made to believe the unacceptable was
acceptable.</p>
<p>And there was no choice but to use psychiatry’s beliefs
to explain the distress and internal chaos that were my
norm. To question those beliefs was to question
psychiatry’s authority, and questioning that authority
was akin to being a non-compliant “behaviour problem.”
It didn’t take long before any will to question, to
wonder, was gone. This is just how it was.</p>
<p>Through willful blindness, psychiatry, and mental
health care more broadly, push people to the margins of
their own communities. Inherent within the experiences
of being identified and “treated” as one who is
“mentally ill” is a process of separation. To identify
someone as a mental patient is to render them
fundamentally different from a socially constructed
norm. To be distinguished in this way is to be separated
from one’s kin. Being isolated in this way creates a
loneliness like no other.</p>
<p>Ad nauseam, mainstream mental health care responds to
statements like ours by saying, “this is stigma, we’re
fighting against stigma!” That same willful blindness
disguises the fact that this stigma, that mainstream
mental health care is apparently campaigning so
valiantly against, is actually a direct by-product of a
system of “care” that insists on medicalizing and
pathologizing natural and expected responses to trauma
and adversity.</p>
<h5><strong>What does a person do who finds they have been
so deeply betrayed by those who claimed to be helping
them—by doctors, society, friends, and family?</strong></h5>
<p><em>Karin:</em> In all my work as an activist there was
something reassuring, I guess, about the narrative being
something like a barge that we had to turn, and that
barge was stubborn and heavy and big…and slow. It was
reassuring because I also knew very well how slow
healing happens. Something about the slowness made me
think that the healing that needed to happen could
happen while we moved people towards understanding their
suffering differently.</p>
<p>But the Moncrieff et al study is waking a lot of people
up to their psychiatric survivor status very abruptly.
Some may be realizing that a loved one who died by
suicide might have been a victim of psychiatry. That is
a lot to come to terms with.</p>
<p>I look at what happened to me when I realized the
damage that had been done by those that peddled the
“chemical imbalance” theory of suffering, when I
realized the lie I was told. And the thing I remember
most is the betrayal and anger. The rage really. I mean,
I can still feel it. It’s very real inside me still when
I think about it. I nearly threw up thinking about how
many people this is happening to right now since this
study was published because I remember what this was
like.</p>
<p>For those who are feeling this for the first time, I
want to say something important. Please listen to
psychiatric survivors’ experiences with withdrawal and
do not cold turkey the antidepressants. I know they are
a little grenade in your mouth, swallowing some kind of
trauma bomb, the pain of that is real. It ends up
feeling like a retraumatization every time you put that
thing up to your lips. And you know there was so much
more wrong with your world than a broken brain when they
put you on them. You know no one was listening to what
you told them about the ways they hurt you, the ways
your grief was silenced and ignored, the ways the
abusers were just given a pass to keep abusing you…I
know.</p>
<p>But, the dangers of SSRI withdrawal are real and so
horrific, too. I know… when does it end? You know where
it ends? When you find peers to talk to about what this
feels like. We’ve got some resources at the bottom of
this page to check out for support.</p>
<p><em>Marnie:</em> Friends disappeared. Family members
chose the diagnoses. Society saw me as a mental patient.
“Healers” were anything but. Everyone who knew me saw a
mental patient first. No one listened. It seemed they
saw no need for this. What I had to say was filtered
through a prescribed lens, the lens of psych diagnoses.</p>
<p>My self? My person? My individuality? These were
exchanged for the identity that was applied to me by
psychiatry, the ruling authority. This was an authority
that became everything. It didn’t take long to figure
out that speaking <em>as me</em> was viewed as “talking
back.” Accepting the silencing and the oppression was
essential. To do otherwise made all that was so hard,
that much harder.</p>
<p>If those who care about and for us don’t know they are
betraying us, is it actually betrayal? Yes. Absolutely
and without doubt. And when I think about this, and I
think about speaking with family about this, my history
of experience suggests their responses would show their
sensibilities had been offended. <em>“We didn’t know.
We did what we thought was best.”</em></p>
<p>Really, it felt as though no one genuinely wanted to
know … about me, about why I was so distressed.
References to trauma and adversity were stuffed behind
the diagnoses. The diagnoses were what mattered. And so,
like many, I internalized the belief that all I had
experienced didn’t count … none of it mattered, and
certainly not enough to offer any viable explanation …<em>
I was the problem</em>. Like those nightmares where
you’re screaming but no sound is coming out of your
throat … it doesn’t take long to learn there’s no point
in screaming … apathy takes root.</p>
<p>Long after the time when I emancipated myself from the
system, the silencing and the oppression continued. I
used to think it was possible to move beyond this sense
of betrayal. I’m no longer so sure … so much damage was
done … I see subtle signs that broken trusts may not
ever be repaired. When I watch myself, I see that I’m
guarded, almost always … I don’t need to wonder where
this comes from. What do I do with this sense of
betrayal? Mostly, I keep it hidden.</p>
<h5><strong>How do we sit with the layers of grief and
loss as we look back at the ways our lives could have
been different?</strong></h5>
<p><em>Karin:</em> In the last few years, I have turned to
earth based spirituality—camping, gardening, art making
(of course), and writing. These things saved me from
falling into a constant state of rage. And that kind of
rage, I feel, is more effective than even psychiatry at
destroying a person. So I had to let it go the best I
could.</p>
<p>But, still, with everything I went through, the anger
and the pain are sometimes so overwhelming. The fact
that what I was told about my suffering was all an
unproven lie, that I had nearly lost everything,
including my life, to their treatment while everyone I
loved looked on, convinced of their compassion for me,
was a betrayal of almost unimaginable proportions. Even
as I got well, a horrific journey towards it through
withdrawal, and forgave the people in my life I could,
the anger only amplified—how much suffering could a
“healer” inflict on someone who came to them in pain?</p>
<p>It’s mind blowing. It was absolutely horrific. Like
Marnie, I lost friends, was in conflict with seemingly
everyone just to find freedom from what I knew was
killing me. I was isolated from my community. The
feeling of this loss, for me, was like a grenade going
off in my chest every day.</p>
<p>To all those bombs going off all across the world right
now post-Moncrieff et al, please, please find
us—psychiatric survivors—we can get through this
together.</p>
<p><em>Marnie:</em> The past is the past … many talk about
the importance of letting go, of moving on … but
awareness isn’t in the past, and there are times when
the layers of grief, the feelings of loss, can feel as
though they will crush my chest, taking away my very
breath. Grief comes in waves—tidal waves—without
warning, they wash into, and over, my life, my self.
Awareness of all that was lost, taken, stolen … this
lives as a permanence within me. How can it not?</p>
<p>While my emancipation is without regret, my history is
alive. All that never was and will never be … these
realizations come as a deafening roar that can fill my
mind. In those times when this despairing turmoil lands
in my awareness, it brings with it a loneliness,
inspired by knowing that most of the people I know and
interact with in my day-to-day life do not—cannot—come
even close to relating to any of this. It’s a deeply
felt loneliness, and these feelings of invisibility and
invalidation stay fresh in my mind. Choices are made
based on this sticky residue. And so, sitting with this
grief means living with more self-silencing. It’s become
the lesser of evils.</p>
<h5><strong>How is our culture isolating us from each
other and preventing us from feeling safe being
ourselves in the world?</strong></h5>
<p><em>Karin:</em> This for me, has always boiled down to
marketing. It’s important to ask what, about any
messages you receive, is in their own interest for you
to believe about yourself and others? Regarding the
question here, who does it serve to limit what resources
in mental health we believe are available to us? What we
believe about what dangers lurk in the community around
us? The media creates narratives around all this, and
narrative creates our “reality,” or a version of it
anyway.</p>
<p>The stories we tell each other about mental health and
community resources around emotional suffering are at
the core of our survival—as individuals and a community.</p>
<p>Sowing divisiveness and conflict is a part of a
constant barrage of messaging. There is an “us” and a
“them.” And emotional suffering makes you a vulnerable
“them,” so it should be avoided, “fixed,” or shut down
immediately. No less important is the narrative of lack
that makes its imprint on our social and inner
lives—constantly putting us in a state of disappointment
in ourselves, our bodies, and our identities. We always
have something to reach for to “fix” what is wrong with
us, but it is never reaching for one another, or
community resources, for the compassion and validation
we need.</p>
<p>Alternative resources exist in the Mad Pride Movement,
the Psychiatric Survivor movement and other movements in
the field of mental health. Alternative narratives that
conflicted with the biomedical model, like Open
Dialogue, for example, which is a wonderful way to
approach altered states, never gained the traction they
deserved. Because it dared to think people could
recover, and considered the faults of the systems around
a person instead of blaming their chemistry.</p>
<p><em>Marnie:</em> To be a mental patient is to be
exposed every day to layers of messages that become
deeply internalised. These shape us. They shape our
sense of self. They shape how we see ourselves. They
shape how we see ourselves in relation to others. They
shape how we see ourselves in relation to the world
around us. This is institutionalization. This is
indoctrination. This is oppression.</p>
<p>We are all individuals having individual experiences.
If we cannot be fully human without worrying what this
means for us, if we cannot experience the full range of
our humanness, without worrying that there might be
something wrong, then we cannot be in the world in a
manner that is safe.</p>
<p>To this day, all these years later, enormous ongoing
effort is required to go against, to undo, these
internalized messages. Some days, to walk in the world,
while habitually looking over my shoulder, requires a
lot of energy … and FFS it requires a lot of grit and
courage. It feels as though this grit and courage is
invisible to most people … how can it not be?</p>
<h5><strong>There is a growing international community who
are creating safe spaces where those suffering with
emotional distress can be seen, heard, acknowledged
and validated.</strong></h5>
<p><em>Karin:</em> The dialogue here isn’t turning towards
peers and that is deeply disturbing to me. There is
still such a deep distrust for those who have suffered
and survived psychiatry, withdrawal, and emotional
distress. This creates yet more space in this void of
the story of suffering for those who have no idea what
it actually means to survive it to dictate treatment for
it.</p>
<p>If there is anything I would like to see from this
space that is open to new voices around the cause of
mental distress since the Moncrieff et al paper, it is
that peers, activists, and critical psychiatry voices
get the say they deserved all along. We have been
silenced long enough.</p>
<p><em>Marnie:</em> People are seeing through the
illusions. They’re seeing the disconnects. They’re
asking questions. The dominance of the biomedical
narrative is fraying, fragmenting, breaking down. The
flimsiness of this “neuromythology” is becoming
increasingly apparent. The false nature of these things
that have been widely sold as discrete, discernable
“mental illnesses” is being seen for what it is, by more
people than ever before.</p>
<p>Our human condition is anything but tidy. To be fully
human is to accept, even embrace, the chaos that is
inevitable, and essential to negotiating the messy
terrain of daily living. Being ourselves without fear of
reprisal, without fear that any part of who and how we
are will be medicalized or pathologized, is essential to
wellbeing. For me, living with my grief, my internal
chaos, the thoughts and feelings that are challenging
for me (and sometimes others) has been made that much
more bearable by the international community of
like-minded people …. those of us who fully inhabit our
humanness.</p>
<h5><strong>Conclusion</strong></h5>
<p>For six decades, a highly effective propaganda campaign
sold the chemical imbalance theory to millions of people
all over the world. Whether psychiatry believed it
matters little when juxtaposed against the countless
lives that have been damaged by the myth of the chemical
imbalance.</p>
<p>An uncritical acceptance of the dominant biomedical
narrative by health care systems and providers, the
media, and Joe & Josephine Citizen, has enabled what
Paulo Freire called a “pedagogy of the oppressed.” The
oppressors and the oppressed are blinded to a vicious
cycle of oppression. Feeling states that are not happy
and/or peaceful have become widely rejected aberrations.
Tolerance of suffering has become diminished to the
point that any despair, fear, or states of distress and
internal chaos have become “symptoms of disorder.”</p>
<p>This widely adopted, societally constructed belief,
enabled intolerance of suffering as well as a form of
social control. Restricting the full range of emotions
that are part of the human condition, through the
psychiatric/pharmaceutical paradigm, has created strict
rules of which emotions are “good” and which are “bad.”
The psychiatric survivor movement brings forth the idea
that all emotions, held safely and together, can lead to
healing.</p>
<p>If you now realize you are one of the countless lives
that have been damaged and you are feeling betrayed and
overwhelmed by grief and loss, know that the psychiatric
survivor network is here to help you heal.</p>
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