Committed to the Sane Asylum: Narratives on Mental Wellness and Healing

3. Towards Healing

Those who were then governing the country knew what was really happening to it and what we later called zastoi, roughly translated as stagnation.… One of the richest countries in the world, endowed with immense overall potential, was already sliding downwards. Our society was declining both economically and intellectually. And yet to the casual observer, the country seemed to present a picture of relative well-being, stability and order.… Such was the situation in the spring of 1985 and there was a great temptation to leave things as they were, to make only cosmetic changes. This, however, meant continuing to deceive ourselves and the people.… Perestroika [restructuring] has enabled us to open up to the world. —Mikhail Gorbachev1 Susan Healing Beginnings By the early 1980s the dysfunction in my life and marriage forced me to choose between remaining stagnated on antipsychotic drugs or risk the venture into an unknown examination of the decaying inner system that held my own false union of self together. While wise and generous energies brought Mikhail Gorbachev to Russia’s aid, I never cease to be amazed at the energies that allowed me to not only begin reclaiming the psychic realms occupied by influences I was no longer 47 3 Towards Healing prepared to endure but to also begin a process of healing through tracking that story. Commitment to Heal Ten years after the event of my psychosis, life forced me to seriously question the drugs that psychiatrists had so assuredly prescribed me. Though drugged, my art spirit was kept vicariously alive from the kitchen where I could overhear the piano teacher explain music to the children. My daughter’s enthusiastic renderings of lengthy Aram Katchatourian works and quickly uttered “SHIT!” at the odd missed note came, along with the music itself from the other room; the sounds reached my soul like critical counterpoints to the antipsychotic drug side effects that had grown from frustrations to physical harms then to suicidal urges. Markedly slowed, I moved from one task to another in sedated robotic fashion gaining motivation by saying to myself,“I - m-u-s-t - l-o-a-d - t-h-e d -i-s-h-w-a-s-h-e-r.” Or “I- m-u-s-t - m-a-k-e- t-h-e - b-e-d-s.” I’ve heard many people describe drugged thinking as walking in corn syrup. It’s an accurate description. To wash and change seven beds took an entire nine-to-five workday. The bending required to make beds and load a dishwasher left me light headed, dizzy, flushed, and short of breath. I needed charts to mark when I took drugs because I forgot the minute I took them. I remained mostly silent on social occasions since I forgot what I was about to say before I spoke and was slow and stammering if I did speak. In a distant part of my mind, I worried my intelligence was severely harmed, but my drugged stupor and passivity made it difficult to question either my disabilities or my psychiatric treatment. Without being prescribed or offered psychotherapy at any point during my years on drugs, the sole sources of counselling in our suburb that I was aware of were the family doctor to whom the hospital referred me in my sixth year on drugs and the parish priest. I was intuitive enough to know that both men had already labelled me“crazy”and how the priest would refer me to the doctor and the doctor would prescribe more drugs if I told either of my suicidal thoughts. On my own, I paid serious attention to and coped with my suicidal urges for a time but when these feelings threatened to override my fears for the children’s safety, I despaired that my options were at an end. A turning point occurred on the darkest of days around the 1980 period. I made a decision that day to fight against the rest of my being to give water to a dying houseplant. The near-death state of the plant disturbed me to the degree that the plant’s survival seemed inseparable from my own survival. My depressed, leaden body caused the watering of the plant to be among the most difficult feats I have ever performed.But I did get water to the plant and through 48 Towards Healing that act, not only opened...