Comments on: Dorothea Buck’s Memoir Tells of the Horrors of Twentieth Century Psychiatry: A “Hell Amidst Bible Quotes”

By: Jim Freda

Jim Freda — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 13:51:50 +0000

In reply to Carol.

During my daughters second major psychotic break recently, while I was with her in the car desperately trying to find a hospital to bring her to where she could be safe, or while sitting with her waiting for the intake process, I had a chance to talk to her and listen to her in the full bloom of her psychosis. The things that she said were sometimes alarming and often profoundly beautiful and painful. I wanted more than anything for her to be safe and to be cared tenderly. I wanted her to be respected and to be nurtured through the pain she was experiencing. I knew though that the best that I would probably get for my daughter would be drug induced stupor but I had little choice. Her life was at risk and I knew it. As she cycled through states of paranoia and delusion and incredibly sweet childlike innocence, or unbearable philosophical introspection, I had the strong feeling that she was very close to truth, too close to avoid being burned by it, and I tried my best to honor what she was experiencing. In the heavily institutionalized year-long process of recovery that would follow I believe I was the only person who had this perspective.
Gregory Bateson observed in “From Versailles to Cybernetics” that “If your universe is crazy then you are, that is if you try to be sane.” It is an interesting essay and these are words I often return to as a historian and social theorist.
I understand some of the trauma that my daughter has experienced in her family life and in the world and my heart is broken because of it. I was so fearful for her life in the moment of her psychosis that I could only desperately try to find safety for her. I understood the very real danger And had experienced it before in her first episode. She is a wonderful artist but there was nothing artistic about the tremendous pain and confusion she was experiencing. I experienced the greatest heartbreak that any father can experience, watching the grotesquely insensitive staff and doctors that I entrusted her with mismanage my daughter’s mental and physical health. My daughter was treated horribly and pumped full of drugs despite my desperate pleas to the contrary. The system so deeply broken that in comparison to it my daughters psychosis almost seemed more true and genuine. However this provided very little comfort to my deeply broken heart.
Thank you for sharing the story of a woman who was strong and courageous enough to affirm her own psychosis and active meaning making in this world. What a utopian vision to think of her reclining together with her friends in the garden of the asylum talking freely and reflecting together on what they had experienced inside themselves. I know that it is a far cry from any of the group sessions my daughter experienced in the long course of her heavily medicated care.
I believe that there is a basis for sanity but it does not exist in the dominant mores of culture and science. It is a singular oddity that the word apocalypse in Greek means revelation. I am not sure what to make of that historically speaking and frankly I am not interested because we are today faced with a number of serious challenges like this for which we desperately need some philosophical, theoretical and very personal insight. If ever there was a time for revelatory insight it is today and from the story that you have told it seems clear to me that it will not come from the doctors and the scholars and experts but from within the courage and instinctive mutual kindness of the victims.
I only wish that there were more of those meetings on recliners in gardens amidst all of this chaos and insensitivity. And in that spirit of open sharing I thank you again for your story.

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By: Richard Maxwell

Richard Maxwell — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 10:58:26 +0000

I would like Susanne’s email
address. I experienced a rape
by an older student at Stanford
in 1956. I sought refuge in
psychiatry and was threatened
with a lobotomy for my trouble. I’m still in recovery from “adverse childhood experiences”. Check out my
blog: ramax9.blogspot.com

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By: Ya

Ya — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 08:37:22 +0000

After over 20 years of psychiatric “care” and gaps where care was not available, safe to say humanity still needs a lot of help with mental health. We’re in a shambles. While ethics are arguably better than the ’30’s, there’s plenty of room for improvement in patient care. And taking care of the providers actually trying to help their charges. Hospitalizations, 30+drugs/combos, bad docs, bad diagnoses, bad therapists, ECT (should be outlawed), TMS, and lots of different behavioral therapies. That’s just me. Can’t count on my fingers anymore how many have been lost to suicide along the way. Mental illness makes life hell. Every day is a battle. What works with all 3 proper diagnoses better than all of the chemicals and most of the treatments? Customize it, but grounding is a great resource. Finding what works for you is key. It could be a literal life saver. Of course keep up with your treatment plan and get the help you need, just put it in your survival kit. Practice it regularly so it becomes muscle memory. When you feel an episode of whatever coming on, start grounding. Your body kinda takes over until your brain and heart stop suffering so intensely. Then you soldier on. Breathe in, breathe out, one foot in front of the other til you come out the other side. Good luck out there, I’m praying for you.

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By: Carol

Carol — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 12:11:11 +0000

It is good to be reminded that human nature doesn’t change albeit the details have changed. The Power Imbalance remains and harm continues. Advocates for humane care walk a fine line. If we refer to the 1930s then we can be misconstrued as out-of-date and misinformed. So we do the best we can to speak from our own observations and experiences. The advances in research, which regretfully have been made at the expense of patients, validate all the axes of the needed, higher standard of care. These two elements: our witness to harm and the truth about the foundations of health inform our advocacy. A third element could be added: that is to honor the ways different cultures have nurtured their young in context of their own survival challenges; the juxtaposition with today’s psychiatric state is compelling.

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By: No-one

No-one — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:21:11 +0000

One thing that hasn’t changed in psychiatry and in dominant social attitudes since the 20th century with regards what we call ‘mental illness’ is that all the thinking and psychiatric concepts are defined first by outward presentations of the conditions rather then an investigaion of the inner states, and secondly, that they are socially and psychologically normative – they define ‘mental health’ as normal egoistic functioning and normal socially conditioned behaviour, and they define pathological as non-ordinary mental states and behaviour, which means we don’t actually see the condition or attempt to understand it at all: rather, we see all the devience from the norm and judge and conceptualize the condition accordingly through an analysis of outward presentation, without any serious concern to uncover the actual inner psychological states, or to put it another way, to explore the phenomenology of the experience. Few exceptions to this have been Laing’s existential psychology, and Jung’s psychological insights which developed through deep self-enquiry and non-ordinary experiences that today we might regard as ‘psychotic’ in character. The key problem with all of this is that the ordinary social psychology of selfish individualistic egoism, and the normal socially conditioned behaviour of becoming a confused and unhappy, striving person whose behaviour is contributing to the destruction of the Earth and all our children’s futures, is not looking quite the model of sanity it did in the Early twentieth century, and just as the whole of civilization seems to be unravelling, in psychiatry and in the contemporary society we are seeing the destructive consequences of the ordinary social psychology with the proliferation of total delusional beliefs and conspiracy theories, with the proliferation of political and social divisions, with the massive inrease in mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and gun crime in the US, knife crime in the UK and so forth, the norm is destroying us all. So let’s destroy the norm. We have to destroy the system that’s destroying the Earth, but that system is also in our heads, hence the modern interest in psychedelic therapy which disables the default mode network in our brain and helps us to wriggle free of our socially conditioned factory consciousness. I had psychosis for years but an intensive period of psychedelic use helped me to go beyond it and gain invaluable learning along the way. Perhaps the greatest danger for us today is thinking and behaving in the normal, socially conditioned, destructive way.

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By: Jamie Chanbs

Jamie Chanbs — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 10:41:43 +0000

In reply to Róbert Papp.

Was thinking this all throughout reading the article.

Ableism, medical neglect and medical gaslighting doesn’t even have much of a platform

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By: Nijinsky

Nijinsky — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 05:58:55 +0000

“Buck had been experiencing a series of visions. One of these was that her country’s chancellor, Adolf Hitler, would start a war that would become “monstrous.” No one believed her, and as Buck asked the adults in her life to help her stop this monstrous war, the vision became a psychiatric “symptom.” Hospitalized at a Christian institution called Bethel, diagnosed schizophrenic, Buck was sterilized under the Nazi law for prevention of hereditary diseases.”

I don’t really know anyone with “schizophrenia” who doesn’t have an outlook on life they aren’t supposed to entertain, and is in many ways more sane than the whole kit and kabootle lacking the color to see what they [the “insane” one] are talking about.

What’s quite remarkable, is that after the whole war, she wasn’t supposed to have any inkling of was over, she ended in an asylum again!

Comments on: Dorothea Buck’s Memoir Tells of the Horrors of Twentieth Century Psychiatry: A “Hell Amidst Bible Quotes”

By: Jim Freda

By: Richard Maxwell

By: Ya

By: Carol

By: No-one

By: Jamie Chanbs

By: Nijinsky

By: Róbert Papp