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Walk into your worst fears. —Angela Greig, 1983 What “seething cauldron of snakes” had become uncovered during her late actively psychotic episode, has again been lidded, but has not necessarily disappeared. —Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Patient Record, Psychological Report on Susan Schellenberg, 17 September 1969 Susan Obtaining the Clinical Records It was 1995. I was alone in the Queen Street Mental Health Centre medical records office. As a condition of my obtaining my records, the attendant instructed me to read my Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital records in her presence .Within moments of opening the records, I began to feel again the shame and disturbing chemistry of my original hospital experience. Later that same afternoon, chance organized that I was scheduled to visit my naturopath. Perplexed by the fact that each of my wrists showed a different pulse rate, the naturopath, when informed I had just come from reading my psychiatric records, concurred that my reliving of the split most likely produced this temporary physical reaction. The opportunity to have the naturopath witness and confirm my body’s reaction so soon after reading my records normalized and assisted my letting go of a difficult experience. 89 5 Conversations on Mental Health Care My decision to obtain my psychiatric records was much like my decision to divorce. I did not want either at the time but lacked workable alternatives. In the case of the records, I wanted to write this book and the book’s integrity would not be possible without the records. I did not need the records to con- firm I had been mentally ill but I did need them to confirm how factually off the mark both my husband, who gave the hospital my history, and the psychiatrists , who planned my treatment based on that history, had been. When I first asked Rosemary to read my records, I doubted my right to complain about my psychiatric treatment. Since my 1969 psychiatric hospital admission, I knew the drugs were a godsend in the beginning because no act of will allowed me to break out of the psychosis. I also had recognizable facts that reinforced that some part of me was not yet right: I had come close to another psychosis in the early 1980s when I was in speech therapy; I had an inability to relate in marriage; I struggled to paint without becoming overwhelmed ; and I frequently recognized that people saw me as “strange” when memory, speech difficulties, or rage lessened my ability to express my ideas. Without knowledge of the mental health system or how it regarded and treated women’s mental illnesses, I lacked reasons to complain. The records and Rosemary’s balanced view of them helped me attain more objectivity on my illness and treatment. Endless writing and rewriting, and reading and rereading of the records strengthened my ability to trust that although my psychiatric treatment may have been excellent in terms of what the psychiatric model offered, its gender biases and non-listening to my story or our story as a married couple were damaging to my family and me. There is a history of mental illness on both sides of my family.My mother’s sister, a national buyer for a large department store chain, was in her early forties and on her way to Paris when she became catatonic. After long-term hospitalization , she was lobotomized and then lived out her life in a series of nursing homes. My father’s nephew, the son of soldier who had been badly gassed and permanently hospitalized after World War I,was sent by his mother and his parish priest to study for the priesthood to avoid being drafted into military services in World War II. His mental illness began in the seminary and he was hospitalized many times before being lobotomized.A major shame surrounded my father’s brother, whose existence and mental illness remained secret until 1995, when exploring that gap in our family story became important to my writing this book and the text that accompanies my Shedding Skins dream art.A family-assisted search for my uncle’s records resulted in our receiving a synopsis of my uncle Leo Marrin Regan’s life from Kingston Psychiatric Hospital (see Appendix II, p. 241). Besides allowing this forgotten man to become more integrated into my siblings’ and my histories, the added family story found in my uncle’s history opened me to a deeper understanding and compassion for the grieving, deny90 Conversations...

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