My Painful Progress - 4 Years of Activism

Lessons from Mental Health Client Advocacy

by Sharon Clausen

1. I’d rather just be called crazy.

2. Few believe that progress towards recognition of our equal rights is a struggle much like that of people of color, women and the physically disabled. But we all pass through the same struggle for respect, recognition and empowerment.

3. The more things change, the more they are the same. Crazies are still at the invisible bottom of the prejudice pile:

• Disbelieved by the courts
• Abused in the prisons
• Brainwashed in hospitals
• Ejected from livelihoods
• Evicted from housing
• Ignored on the streets
• Abhorred by normies
• Overdosed by doctors
• Invisible to politicians
• Laughed at by everyone

4. In community after community crazies attempt - time and again - to organize. The groups fall in the same traps over and over and collapse. I think we don’t know ourselves and each other well enough.

5. Few normies understand that legal drug abuse at the command of MD’s is damaging, painful, addictive and deadly as we know it can be - just as they don’t realize that the crazy "symptoms" they see are likely to be drug "side effects," not signs of insanity.

6. We have not found a way past the carrots normies dangle to bribe and divide and conquer us. There is no consensus that we are better off if we help each other, or that we can help each other and act together.

7. Murder, destroy, banish, institutionalize - these can be psychic terms - it is the psychic destruction, banishment, murder practiced by society (along with plain old physical abuse) that makes crazies. Be institutionalized and these terms can get very real. Once physically confined, destruction, banishment and even murder become physical possibilities and realities.

8. There is no way the professionals (normies) are going to recognize the professionalism that experience gives so many crazies. It threatens the "professional’s" careers too much - and most are in denial about their hostility to any crazy who challenges the status quo. This leads to crazy employment in the field for us crazies. Hostility, denial, projection, scapegoating on the part of the professionals follow.

9. Demonstration of the psychic, emotional, mental, intellectual, intuitive power (call it what you like) of crazies to help each other frightens and threatens normies - they don’t want to accept that insanity may also be intelligence, spiritual power, psychic intuitiveness.

10. Certified lunatics like me have a wonderful opportunity to devote their time and energy to good works. SSI can be viewed as a stipend for National Service - our job being to make ourselves, our community, state, nation, world a better place.

• Low-impact living
• Greening the planet
• Re-use and reduce use of toxics and non-renewables
• Renew and honor the natural world