I Don't Need Your Help

Note: This short piece was written in a period of intense anger and mourning. Since I wrote this draft many things have changed as regards to my thinking and approach to these issues. Because of these changes I no longer feel comfortable editing or adding to what has already been written, but I believe there’s something in my anger that still might be of value to others. So I make this public knowing there are things which I find disagreeable. If you find nothing of value here feel free to dismiss it and move on.

I am empty. I have been told by professionals that this is a result of a mental illness, that the torturous hunger in my gut is a behavioral disorder. I have been led to believe that the only way to cure me of this disease, the only way I might be cleansed, is extensive dialectical behavioral therapy and medication. If I don’t go through with this treatment plan then I have been assured that I will fail to live up to my responsibilities, that I will continue to fumble through school, that I will not be able to maintain a career, that I will be left lost in life. I have been told that it’s possible to get better, that one day the emptiness will go away, if only I give in. Most importantly of all, I have been assured that this is a purely internal issue, that this emptiness comes from within, that I only need to look at myself and realize that I am wrong. If I have any misgivings they are summarily dismissed. After all, what objection could I raise that would cancel out the final outcome, a life worth living?

This isn’t the first time I’ve been put through treatment and medication. Citalopram for depression, lorazepam for anxiety, and aripiprazole, an antipsychotic, also for depression. Just as now, I was assured that the issue was purely internal. A defect in hormone production, or perhaps a case of genetic bad luck. Regardless of the reason, I was told just as I am now that the source of my problems could only be found within, and my therapist was able to figure all of this out after only two sessions. The dosage of the citalopram started low, but it was increased over time until my psychiatrist no longer wished to increase the dosage. This is when the aripiprazole came into play. It was meant to enhance the effect of the citalopram. Finally the medication began to work, in the sense that it eliminated the parts of me which were considered to be undesirable. For a time there was a sense of relief. I no longer felt the crushing weight of my depression, but as I reflected on my newly cured state I soon realized that I no longer felt anything at all. Whereas once I had suffered from an evergreen despair, now I was empty, completely empty.

It would be tempting to say that this is where the emptiness began, but this would be a lie, or if not a lie it is wholly uncertain. I can’t tell you when the emptiness began, when the hole first appeared. I’ve found that all of my memories are colored by my existence in the present, that no matter how hard I try I can’t remember a time before the void. So I can’t tell you that this is the beginning, I don’t know that there was a beginning. People close to me will tell you that I haven’t always been like this, and there was once a time when I believed I could assign a chronology to these feelings, but that time is gone, and now all I feel and see when I turn backward is that hunger, perpetual unfulfillment. The emptiness then transcends the bounds of time, displacing the center point of my cognition, blurring the line between passive memory and active experience. By pure accident I was eventually prevented from continuing my medication, but the emptiness never went away. My mind is dominated by the void, my life only a history of emptiness. 

But when the emptiness began doesn’t matter. Now it is universal, totalizing, unrelenting. But enough with these musings. I’m not writing this for sympathy or pity. Rather I write to say that I refuse this reality, I refuse the pretensions of the psychiatrists, the web spinning of the therapists. I reject this narrative of mental illness. I reject the idea that I am defective. What has been presented to me as a cure is in fact the very thing that is hostile to my existence. There is no genuine care for my well-being on the part of this industry, there is no desire to see me fixed. What has been decided for me is that this condition is wrong, that my existence constitutes evidence of an error, that I need to be reshaped, recreated. It makes no difference whether we call this truth or lies, because the truth to which I bear witness is that the reason I am seen as defective is because it is demanded of me that I conform to the systems of production that are already in play, that if I cannot get an education or maintain a career it is the fault of myself and not of the institutions which reject myself and others who are like me. I write to say that I am not ill.

I will never sit behind the wheel of a car. I know that there is nothing in the world that would stop me from crashing. I may continue my education, but I know I will face a particular hell, that I will be reminded along the way that I am guilty of intensifying my struggle. I will find even the most minimum amount of work unbearable, and it will be my fault that I can’t keep a job. When I die in debt, alone, and destitute I will not be mourned outside of a false mourning. I will be an irredeemable failure, all because I deny the narratives which have been forced on me, because I deny that I am sick, because I deny that the cure they offer is a true cure. To this state, to this country, to this world, I am worthless, and because I am worthless I deserve no more than to die and be forgotten. 

Maybe I will be criticized for this “decision.” If I will to live with my “illness” then I am guilty of the repercussions. How can I blame the world for my condition when I was given the choice to be a full member of the global citizenry? But I do not blame the world. I do not know the origin of my condition, and I am tired of searching for beginnings. I also reject that I have been presented with a choice, that I am truly free. Or rather I am free in the double sense: I am free to receive treatment, to have my condition managed, to be cleansed of my emptiness, and I am free to die in a ditch. Regardless, I am rejected, forced to choose one form of destruction or another. I am given the choice to die respectably or in complete isolation, both of which amount to death. So I reject both that I blame the world, and that I have a genuine choice. I affirm that I am against this world, that I deny it in the same way it seeks to deny me, that in this battle to the death against an enemy that appears indestructible and omnipotent I choose to fight back. If I am to die, rejected by this world, then I will die in a fiery explosion as opposed to a slow burn. They may place me in the lecture hall or the office cubicle, either way it will not be as a human being but as a bomb. 

Because my existence remains as an obstacle for the general flow of productivity it has been decided that I live a life “unworthy of being lived,” that my death and the death of those like me is a small price to pay for the maintenance of the established order of things. And it is because all of the treatments tossed my way affirm this general position, that I do not deserve to live, that I need to be reconciled or purged from the production process in its entirety, that I reject them, that I refuse to give myself over. I see it as no accident that the therapy which is presented as the universal treatment is, at the same time, used as a threat or derisive insult in the standard goings on of the world. “Get help.” “You need therapy.” “Take your meds.” None of this which constitutes the mental health system is a cure, but rather a way of managing disturbance. Courts can force people into the mental institution (an asylum in honest language) precisely because it is not a cure, because it is a necessary part of the economy of power. The mental institution is just one arm of the biopolitical state, disseminated across the social body. “Everyone wants to be a fascist,” the old saying goes. It is time we fully recognize that the therapist is one of many modes in the general oikonomia of fascism.

The fundamental principle of modern psychiatry, the basic premise from which it takes its legitimacy, is that the only thing which needs to be fixed in order for the mentally ill person to be happy is the person themself. Is it a surprise that the generation raised on Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks movies which reiterate time and time again that the only truly radical change the hero requires is a change of perspective are also being fed into the pop Stoic machine of CBT? The message which this generation has been made to live with is that we are individuals, that we are completely separate from the people and things around us. What the debate between nature and nurture has concealed is the underlying ideological commitment which those of us subjected to this system are already well aware of, that it is us regardless of which side of the debate is correct, that we only need to change the individual in order to achieve happiness, that we can ignore the structures and logics which reproduce what has been labeled as mental illness so long as we can alter the mentally ill themselves. If happiness can be mass produced in the form of a pill then we don’t need to address the anxiety of everyday existence, the issues of housing, food, and electricity. We don’t need to address the cataclysmic changes in the climate which has been a source for increased rates of depression. So long as the individual can be medicated, kept docile, can carry on in the processes of production, then even the end of the world itself is of no concern.

In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous work of atrocious honesty, Salò, the ethical and aesthetic obscenity of the capitalist elite is laid bare. Through layer after layer of shit and blood Pasolini forces us to confront the darkest aspects of lived condition without any hope of a hereafter. But the question that is raised by such a showing is not whether or not we find ourselves in opposition to the fascists of the screen, as a moral condemnation devoid of action is an easy thing. Rather, in being placed in the position of the underclass, the youths put through horrific tortures the likes of which are unimaginable, at least to those of us who live in the West, is the question of whether or not we would resist or comply with fascism if it meant we were offered the chance to maybe live just one more day? And so what I propose here is not simply a condemnation of the way of things, but an act of resistance against fascism, against psychiatry. What Pasolini recognized and the lesson we must learn from him is that complacency can only mean certain death, and so if we are to prevent our destruction then it can only occur in making our resistance felt. It is because Pasolini lived according to this principle that he was murdered. His body destroyed, bludgeoned, and burnt, the desecrated corpse of Pasolini waves through the wind like a banner, crying out to all who would follow him in answering the call of revolution.

The revolution I discuss cannot simply be a political revolution. Destroying the institution of mental health would not destroy mental health. What is required is a revolution of ourselves as much as of the world. It is not enough to destroy the fascist state, you must kill the fascist in your head. As it is with fascism, so it is with psychiatry. As I have already indicated, the logic of the mental health systems is not confined to particular buildings or structures, but is rather disseminated throughout the social body. What we need then is the formation of new forms of life which would cease to participate in the reproduction of the logic of psychiatry, and therefore the logic of fascism. As such I do not propose a distinct solution to the “problem” of mental health. I reject the idea that it is a problem in the first place. To ask what should be done with those of us who are caught within this system is to assume that there is a function served now which is desirable and requires an institution in order to function. I reject both of these premises. 

One will not find contained within this Manifesto a programme or any list of demands. This is for two reasons:

1. What seeks to be expressed is not a plan for political action in the traditional sense, but rather an urge towards the radical creation of new forms of life which can only be developed on the level of community, among friends. As such it would be against the aims of this piece to lay out a rigid framework from which all motions towards the anti-psychiatric life must pass. Rather the intent is to provide the impetus for such a radical creation, to which no universal guide may be provided. To assign a rigid plan to the creation of new forms of life would be to replicate the exact fascist logic we seek to dispense with

2. No demands are made of this world because there is nothing in this world to be demanded other than the world’s destruction. To demand from the world is to demand the incomprehensible, that the systems of power simply disempower themselves, that we change the functioning of the institutions while keeping the institutions themselves. In other words, to demand anything from the world is to engage in a kind of reformism. Rather we reject the world and everything in it, and in our rejection we seek to bring about a new world beginning with the formation of new ways of life. 

It is for these reasons that there are no demands listed in this Manifesto, as any such demands would be in direct opposition to what is being called for. What is desired is radical creativity, not centralized movement in lockstep. If that was the goal, then we should simply stick with psychiatry. This opposition to psychiatry and fascism must present itself as an open (im)possibility, where forms of life are numerous and difference is affirmed. Fascism and psychiatry seek to crush movements of difference, to “correct” life when it errs. The one who claims to hold the single solution which can be applied universally is our enemy. They must be opposed by any means necessary.

It is very likely that I will never see a world that can accommodate my existence. As it stands, that world is an impossible thing.