EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 22

July 2000

  Breaking Down  
  Breaking Through  
 


Joe Kerrane was tragically killed in 1994.
He drowned he was aged 21.
We share an article he wrote shortly before his death.


“This is driving me crazy”,“That was totally mad”,“Tell that to the men in the white coats”.

In today’s society people talk often about madness,but only in a flippant,jokey way. On a serious level the idea of a person losing the control of their mental faculties is still surrounded in taboos. It is still a subject that is avoided in polite conversation,and which frightens many people.

When a student is forced to give up their course due to a physical misfortune like a broken back or other major ailment then they become the focus of local sympathy and it is something recognised as unavoidable and unfortunate. However, when it is due to a mental breakdown or “psychosis” then nothing is ever mentioned and in some cases,the true nature of that person’s illness may be kept quiet.

It is,however, a very common condition. As Breaking Through Breaking Down many as 10% of all students experience some mental imbalance or emotional or mental breakdown during their course. I was amazed after my breakdown just how many people came to me and said that just the same thing had happened to them. Some of them had managed to resolve their problems without ever becoming involved with the psychiatric profession,others had been less fortunate than me, and had actually been “sectioned”. Most patients in psychiatric wards or hospitals are there voluntarily. They have recognised that their problems are too acute for themselves and their families to deal with,and come to seek professional help. A few, however, are held under section II of the Mental Health Act and may therefore be detained and given medication against their will. The only grounds for sectioning someone are that the individual is considered not to be in control of his or her actions and tries to harm either themselves or other people. This is the darkest of the psychiatric profession,and it is this which has made “psychiatric” into the scary word it now is.

Just as scary in most people’s minds are the drugs which are prescribed as e voked by the Dead Kennedy’s – “They force-feed you mind-melting pills,till even the outside world looks great”. The main drugs used to treat psychiatric disorders are major tranquillisers such as Valium and Largactyl. These are powerful calming drugs which slow the mind down and sedate you. On high doses,perception of time becomes distorted,so that a week may seem like a day or two. Sleeping pills are also often prescribed and in many cases,other drugs may be required to counter the side-effects of the tranqullisers even though these other drugs may themselves have side-effects or carry physical risks.

In my opinion,no mental aberration was ever cured by psychiatric drugs. Mental breakdown is a trap:a locked cage from which only the sufferer can find the way out. Where drugs can be helpful is in dealing with the symptoms,not the causes of psychosis. These include lack of sleep/inability to sleep, voices racing uncontrollably within the conscious mind,and the random-seeming upwellings of deep and inexplicable feelings from the subconscious mind. What the causes are is a bone of contention between the spiritually minded and the clinically minded. For the clinically minded it is all cut and dried. I took psychoactive drugs and as a result, I suffered from a drug induced psychosis. Simple. However, this makes as much sense as calling it a college-induced psychosis. This experience happens just as frequently to non-drug users.

You cannot pin the blame for this sort of experience on any one thing,however convenient that maybe for those who campaign against the use of illegal drugs. My breakdown was caused basically by a combination of stress and spiritual and psychic expansion and exploration. Stress obviously has its own causes , which in my case included lack of sleep, pressure of work and lack of love for myself and from those I was in close contact with day-to-day. The spiritual and psychic sides to the episode are very significant,as although they were a positive thing up until the onset of breakdown/psychosis,they opened me up to the type of experience I had.

What I experienced during the two months that my state of profoundly altered consciousness lasted was a total regression to childhood and beyond,right back to the point when I was conceived by my parents. In essence it was a spiritual death and rebirth of huge proportions. For a week and a half I could barely speak and when I opened my mouth to speak,collections of nonsense syllables would come out. My closest friends had to ask whether I still knew who they were. I entered another world, another dimension,a place so far away that nobody and nothing could reach me there and from which it was unbelievably difficult to return.

I lost touch with the first world,the world we all share:the world of places and things which we all take more-or-less for granted. The initial experience was one of paranoia:believing that people were plotting against me or even were imminently about to burst into my home and shoot me. My fantasies became indistinguishable from reality and so intense that I could no longer communicate with people I knew. I didn’t really know where I was or what I was doing. I stopped eating and sleeping,dropping down to 9 stone which for a heavy-boned man of 5ft 10” is positively emaciated. When I was admitted to Halifax General Hospital I was a total wreck. By the time I worked out where I was and what was going on,it was a month later and I was ready to leave.

It’s now a year later, and the memories have started to fade at last. I no longer have dreams in which I’m still mad and no longer have any contact with any of the agencies that were involved in my case. What it has left me with are two strong beliefs:firstly that my breakdown was the most important and positive thing that has every happened to me, and secondly that people going through similar experiences deserve better care than I got.

On the first point, the hell which I travelled through really burnt a lot of the trash I was carrying with me. Deeply held insecurities, negative and depressing habits of thought,and limiting concepts have been blasted out of my life by this experience and I am freer now than I ever have been before.

Although I wouldn’t wish my experience on anybody else, I think that everyone should have the opportunity to share in it’s more positive aspects. Ideally I would like to see places where people of all ages can go at times of massive upheaval and spiritual change in their lives and where they can be looked after and cared for by people who understand the spiritual resonances of such an experience . In all the time I was in hospital (one month) no-one from the establishment offered any real counselling or tried to get to the bottom of the things that were bothering me. At the end of the day what helped me back to full health was the love and support of my family and friends. Those people unfortunate to be without that kind of support just didn’t seem to get any better.

If just a part of the money that was spent on chemical treatment of mental disorders was spent on training various types of therapists and bringing in spiritual healers I’m sure the net result would be a lot more psychiatric returning to society and leading integrated and positive lives. Really, though,what is required is more money. There’s no point in saying to someone “Right, we’ll cut your medication by 50% so that we can afford to get you a therapist”,if that medication is vital for their stability.

These “patients” are today’s shamens and seers. We should seek to learn from them,not to dope them up and keep them quiet. If we cannot understand them then perhaps it is because we haven’t tried hard enough,not because there is no sense in what they say. Every person suffering is in itself a metaphor for the suffering of the Mother. We can see the madness of man’s treatment of the planet manifest within them. It is only a case of raising the group consciousness of the human race to a point where we recognise that,and then the mental afflictions will dissolve into light.

One of the most important battles in this fight for reason is that of self-respect. Many of the people I met while I was on the ward saw themselves as just worthless crazies. Discarded people. Refuse. Once you can make people believe that they are good, worthwhile, loving and beloved people, then the question of ho w crazy they are become purely academic. Once you find love within yourself then there is nothing it will not overcome. There is nothing else but God and each of us is a part of it. Love is the law. Love under will. Creation will endure and seen in its proper perspective our whole existence passes in the blink of an eye. There is no madness. There are only different perspectives,each valid in its own right. As you sow, so shall you reap.
There is no more.

 

left arrowback button right arrow


. Material Copyright © 1997-2000 THOMAS (Those on the Margins of a Society)
THOMAS is an integral part of Catholic Welfare Societies, Registered Charity number 503102