I have hesitated over and over to stand in front of you as a 'consumer', because to do that there is of course the implication that I am 'mentally ill', or have been in the past. And then of course there is the tacit assumption that we all understand exactly what that term means. But to me it is utterly pointless to talk about 'mental illness'. I simply do not believe that there is any such thing. It is a label that is dispensed with absolutely no thought as to its actual meaning. What indeed is the mind that it can supposedly become ill? What in the first place is illness?

There has been much talk of the fact that the mental health system is in crisis, and that the crisis is one of funding. But I feel that the crisis is a much deeper one. The crisis is one of a system that in no way addresses the reality of the very people it seeks to heal. In fact I feel it adds to their difficulties, problems and pain, and then in the circular and illogical thought processes that seem so typical of this system, attributes these difficulties to the so-called 'mental illness'.

The crisis is one of a system in which any true research, thought and exploration is subsumed by the dogmatic empiricism and religiosity of a modern psychiatry which has joined with technology, modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry, in relegating the human being to the status of a bio-chemical machine.

The crisis is one of a system that has forgotten that its original aim was to heal. It has even forgotten the meaning of a true healing. And it has forgotten that healing is more than simply an adherence to a preordained technique or cure, that posits a smiling consumerism and productivity as its neurotic normality and in which suffering can only ever be seen as an aberration.

The crisis is one of a system in which so many assumptions are made about what it is to be a human being.

As I am standing here before you, what are the assumptions you make about me? Will you wonder what my diagnoses were? Will you wonder in what way I was neatly categorised and labelled so that you might feel comfortable in the belief that you were doing something to help me? And if I say that those labels left me feeling angry and condemned, will you see this as further indication of a so-called mental illness, but perhaps add, that now there is also some evidence here of persecutory delusion. Will my anger be seen as indication of denial or resistance? How much of my humanity will you explain away as my remaining symptomology? Could that twitch turn into a bizarre lunge? Am I likely to froth at the mouth and start spurting inanities? Will I curl up on the floor and scream my rage, when I see that you do not understand my point of view? Will you wonder whether I am still on any medication in order to render any of these untoward tendencies benign? Is it safe to let me out in public? Do you even ask yourselves who this person is, you have sitting in front of you? Am I a human being?

And still there is such a reticence to actually tell you of my experiences, to tell you what I think and feel. I still feel the words catching in my throat. I know how careful I must be. I know how much I must adhere to your picture of what I should be. I know I must lessen your discomfort at the inadequacy you feel. I know I must curb the increasing dissension I feel as I sense your growing need to dominate and control. For you have the power to tell me my condition may be worsening. You have the power to threaten me with a hospitalisation, a stronger drug or even ECT. You have the power to tell me that I am my own worst enemy, and you are only doing what is best for me. You have the power to renounce my behaviour if it doesn’t match your aseptic insular world of prescribed norms. You have the power to dismiss anything I say because it is, after all, only the ravings of someone who is 'mentally ill'. A pathetic and meaningless drivel coming from the mouth of someone so utterly at the mercy of her misfiring and miscreant brain. How much of my humanity will be relegated to the unacceptable? How long can you divert attention away from your own sickness, your own delusions, your own insecurities and inabilities? Your own humanity!

When will the people within the system start thinking outside the squares they live in – beyond their barren, consensus-reality, work-day worlds that bear absolutely no relation to the realities of our every day lives? Why don’t you ask yourself questions? Ask them! What is illness? What is a human being? Have drugs ever cured anyone? Is 'mental illness' really a brain disease? Can they really measure neurotransmitters, let alone see them? How many people are damaged and suffering because of the very system that seeks to cure them? Can people really be cured by adhering to some technique or someone’s ideas of what healthy psychological functioning should be? Is it really possible to have just the right number of friends, just the right capacity for intimacy, just the right amount of happiness?

The person you have sitting in front of you is already asking questions, perhaps even the questions you are unable to ask yourself. Perhaps even the questions that a floundering society is unable to ask itself. They are wondering what it means to be human, they are wondering where meaning is, they are wondering why they are suffering. They are wondering what it is that makes life worthwhile. They are asking the questions that all the greatest minds in history have asked. Why must their questions be dulled with drugs? Why must their questions be seen as pathology? Why must they ask their questions in neat little sentences, correctly spelt and with all the punctuation in just the right places? We all ask our questions in our own unique ways, through our pains and our torment, through our depression and grief. But if we are not listened to, we will ask them again and again, and with growing anguish and then desperation. And that desperation is no symptom of a mental illness. If anything, it is a symptom of a system that purports to have the answers, and yet within its ideological framework is rendered incapable of asking even the most mundane questions of itself, let alone anyone else.

There are no rules for living. We each have our own paths to follow in our own unique way. A teenage asylum seeker, who watched as his parents were tortured to death and his village massacred, flees alone to a new country, but is then confined in a detention centre. Is he mentally ill when he screams his utter anguish? Is he not justified in screaming loud and long? Is this not the most human of reactions? A woman survives a childhood of abuse and rape, and shows profoundly normal and clever adaptation to it. Yet is she mentally ill when she howls her distress at learning that those precious lessons which helped her survive, have no place in the everyday world? Is she mentally ill when she must learn to function in a way that everyone else so takes for granted? A ninety-three-year-old woman has begun to rapidly lose her most precious asset, her eyesight, and can no longer read and watch television. Her beloved sister, with whom she talks on the phone every day, suddenly dies. As a result of her failing eyesight she falls and breaks her arm and hip. Is this woman 'mentally ill' when she makes the decision to commit suicide? Which symptoms here are the ones that require a prescription pad? Which techniques will be applied to help these people to see that their behaviour is uncomfortable and undesirable? Which portion of each person’s story will you select in order that it fit with your 'mental illness' paradigm? Which labels will you use, in your misguided belief that they somehow provide resolution? Will you hear only what you want to hear? These are merely normal people reacting to exceptional circumstances. Can you ascertain any meaning in a cry of pain? Why can you not allow yourself to hear it?

But then the teenager might accept your labels and take your pills, because you say they may help him. He knows he is not ill, but at least he feels that in some way you are listening to his distress. The woman who was abused might accept your labels and take your pills, because it seems as if someone is actually doing something to help her. She knows she is not ill, but these might finally help her to feel she somehow belongs. The elderly woman is hospitalised, accepts the labels and takes her pills. She knows she is not ill, but she likes that the nurses know her name, that she listens to music, that she has people to talk to and no longer feels so quite so lonely. And she might even confuse a muddied and medicated brain and the attendant inability to fully identify the exact nature of her pain, with a healing of sorts. The labels and pills become a sign that someone is doing something, that something can be done, that there is hope. But the pills, the labels and the hospitalisation are only a substitute for what these people really need. They simply need a person who can truly listen. A person who can bear with them in their pain. Sadly, it becomes the labels, the pills and the system that prescribes them, and not that other person, that take on an enormous significance as something they can trust, something they can cling to, something solid and predictable, something that can somehow ease their pain, even if only symbolically.

Have you ever been in pain? Have you ever lost a loved one? Lost your treasured dream? Lost your job? What if in your darkest moment someone came up to you and told you that your suffering was merely due to a chemical imbalance. Wouldn’t that just add to your torment? Wouldn’t you feel as though your pain was negated and denied? Wouldn’t you try to explain the meaning of your pain? Wouldn’t you try to tell them what it felt like to be without your husband of thirty years? But what if they persisted? What if they continued to tell you that, no, your reactions were not reasonable ones, and that indeed you might be suffering from some disorder? Grief Over-reaction and Self-defeating Distress Disorder. And why not give it an acronym – GOSDD? What would you do? Would you scream louder to tell them they were wrong? Or would you withdraw into silence and hope they go away? But what if whatever your reaction was, they only saw it as a further indication of your GOSDD? What if some psychiatrist in a fancy office in uptown Chicago had already made a list of all the possible symptoms of GOSDD? What if the only reaction possible is for you to agree that, yes indeed, your grieving is actually aberrant and meaningless behaviour, and yes you are indeed suffering from GOSDD? Not only are you grieving for your husband, but now it seems you are suffering from a disorder as well. Wouldn’t you feel confused and invalidated? Wouldn’t your grief and anguish be multiplied many times over? And what if this escalation was merely seen as a further sign of your illness? Perhaps if this person were forceful enough, you might at some stage even start to doubt yourself. You might start to feel that perhaps you did actually have this GOSDD. You might even take their pills and feel some vague sort of haziness that seems to lessen your grief a little. But at night you still lie in bed wanting your husband, and at some point in your life you are still going to wonder what it means for you to now be without him.

But now you’ve taken the pills. Now you have a 'mental illness'. Now you are merely a patient with a sick brain. How powerful are the words that a psychiatrist speaks. How powerful are the suggestions that you are now a biologically impaired patient, and how difficult it is to break from those suggestions. I wonder how many people are out there who increasingly identify as ‘ill’ and as such find it more and more difficult to define or direct themselves or their lives beyond the scope of this so-called illness? It seems that psychiatry creates the very patients it supposedly tries to heal, and in doing so seems to justify and solidify its own existence. And yet can there ever be any justification for social control and coercion? For suggestion and manipulation?

There simply is no cure for being human, and to suggest that there is, is a fantasy of enormous proportions being perpetrated by the mental health powers-that-be, in the name of a misbegotten claim of scientific validity. There is so much more to life than merely feeling better or living without pain. Psychiatry sees me only as a human body, as a parcel of bone and cells, blood and chemicals, that is constantly at the wretched mercy of all manner of deviation and disorder, and most definitely devoid of meaning or significance. But I am first and foremost a human being. It is as a being that I speak to you through my body and mind, it is I who listen through my ears, it is I who see out of my eyes. It is I who move my arms and legs. It is I as a being who experiences love and pain, beautiful sunsets or hideous desperation. As a whole human being I experience ALL of it, and I derive tremendous meaning from it. Modern psychiatry cannot account for nor prove the profound qualitative meaning of one single tear drop, of one precious look in my lover’s eyes, of one moment of exquisite delight as I watch my dogs romping on the back lawn.

I cannot stand before you and maintain the scientific delusion, that all subjective experience is somehow suspect, simply because it cannot be measured, predicted and controlled. I cannot maintain the delusion that subjective experiences are only valid when they take place within the very confining boundaries set by an elite group of wealthy, white, predominantly male, American psychiatrists. There is an inner space between us where we meet as beings, that is in many ways akin to the outer space where we meet as bodies. We are sitting together in this room as bodies, and yet there is another space in this room that we all sense and partake of together as beings. It does not come to us through our five senses, but rather through a sense of significance and meaning and knowing that is beyond these. You carry a sense of me as a person that is beyond any words we could necessarily find to describe it. You might agree or disagree with what I am saying, but beyond this you can still sense the significance and meaning it holds for me to have this opportunity to talk with you. From this place you could sense immediately if my words were deeply felt and borne of experience, or if they were merely empty words. Even in my silence there will be meaning and significance. You might sense my discomfort or impatience when I can’t find the right words, or you might sense  questing for the right words with which I try to convey my meaning. But beyond this you might also sense that for me silence has had a significance and import that goes beyond these. You may not be able to pinpoint the exact nature of this ‘significance of silence’, you may not be able to find words for it, but you will ‘sense’ it. It will come to you on the edges of your perception or consciousness, like a face in a crowd that you recognise but simply can’t place. And in this group of people I sense similar nuances and tones from you, which then mix with and influence mine. And together we make up a very unique and fluid experience of ‘being here with each other’, the meaning of which we will carry with us, for some time after we all leave this room. You may remember the things I have said, and the words I have used, but beyond that, you will also remember that which was borne out through my words. You will remember something of the very essence of who I am.

And it doesn’t matter what you call this essential space. We can all identify it when it opens up with our lover, or a dear friend, our child or a parent. We can feel a connection and communion that is beyond our everyday perception. We can feel the streaming of a meaning that requires no words. We can feel an understanding that encompasses everything we are to each other. We can sense the subtleties of the way a person moves or carries themselves. It is from this essential space that we can truly listen to each other and understand each other. It is from this essential space that each person who is suffering wishes to be heard. And it is this essential connection that each of these people we call ‘consumer’ is looking for. Always. And it is only when this essential space opens up between and within two people that any true healing can take place, for it is only from this space that we can acknowledge the wholeness of our being, and the wholeness of another. We can begin to sense in the wordless way we do with a lover, the real meaning behind a person’s pain or grief. It doesn’t matter whether you are a social worker, a GP, a psychiatrist, a therapist, a psychologist, a kindergarten teacher, a cook, a cleaner or a fisherman. It is essentially irrelevant which technique, therapy, or system you subscribe to. What truly matters is your capacity for a deep listening and a deep understanding, which carries with it a profound and deeply felt way of bearing with a person in distress. Those within the mental health field are only in a unique position, because it is to them that people most often come for help or come when they are searching.

Listening is not just a listening to words. It is not a listening to empty details. It is not a listening so that you can fill up your endless case notes. Yes there must be those as well, but you have forgotten that you are listening to human beings.

And we know it, but don’t dare to hope that this could be even possible.