Travelling to Providence Farm

An odd thing happened on the way to the funny farm. I was going there because my friend Kenn met "Mary," a woman who belongs to the British Columbia Schizophrenia Society (formerly Friends of Schizophrenics, a group of family members of people labelled schizophrenic. The Schizophrenia Society is similar to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in the U.S.). Mary's friend "Sally," also a BCSS member, had arranged a tour. The purpose was to check out Providence Farm on Vancouver Island. as a step towards a proposal to create a similar place on the grounds of Riverview, Vancouver's provincial psychiatric hospital. Riverview is being revamped (many beds closed) due to financial pressures.

Vancouver is on the mainland of BC. Mary, who had never met me, picked me up at the corner of Main and 15th. I got into the back seat and we introduced ourselves (Kenn was supposed to have come along but couldn't make it) and I met her son "Bill," who was sitting in front. Bill has been labelled "schizoaffective" and he and Mary believe this to be a meaningful diagnosis, as far as I can tell.

Kenn had told Mary I'd once said my dream was to start a funny farm where people could get over their problems -- an alternative to hospitals that just gave people new sets of problems without solving the ones they already had. She was eager to meet me, just on that basis, and had kindly agreed to take me on this trip.

In the car on the way to Tsawassen Ferry Terminal, I spoke a bit about what I think about psychiatry, hospitals and medications (that they're bad for people). No one disagreed with me. Every couple of minutes, for most of the ride, Bill would ask questions like "Did somebody just say that someone has power?" or "Did someone just say 'How dare you'?" or "Did you say 'hate'?" or "Did you just say 'no'?" or "Did someone say they were sorry about something?" Mary assured him each time that no one had said any of these things. At one point I asked what he meant when he talked about people having power and he said, "Like politicians. Or doctors." He then thanked me for having asked.

Several times he apologized for being "racy" (thinking too fast; talking too much) or "escalated." He pointed out, when asked by his mother to be quiet, that he was trying to do so. He also kept apologizing each time he interrupted a conversation between Mary and I to ask whether someone had just said what he'd just heard.

Bill takes several different kinds of psychiatric medications including lithium, minor tranquillizers and major tranquillizers. Mary mentioned that he was on a lot of medication. He said, "It's slows me down." She said, "Well, it speeds you up, too." I bit my tongue and did not say, "And it certainly doesn't make you stop hearing voices, does it?"

On the ferry I met Sally, a beautiful woman in her sixties, who also had a son who has been labelled schizophrenic. I liked her right away. For one thing, she'd brought along a great big package of cheese and egg sandwiches. I'd brought no food and not enough money, and she was not only not offended, but delighted, when I took six of them off her hands over the course of the day.

I found myself telling her, at her request, about my sojourn into the land of professional help. How I went nuts in 1978 when everything in my life went wrong all at once, and signed myself into a hospital ward which I was then not allowed to leave. How I was treated when I got there, what this did to me, and how many years it took me to get over it. How I escaped from my third and last lock-up in 1980 and have not taken "antipsychotic" drugs since, despite having been told I was schizophrenic and would need them all my life. Why I believe chronic mental patients are created by the alliance between the psychiatric (social control) system and the pharmaceutical (chemical control) industry. How I went nuts in 1989 and was helped by a friend who'd been crazy herself and was not afraid of my weirdness, and got over it within a day, whereas when I went nuts and got hospitalized, it took months and months before I stopped being crazy, in spite (or because) of drugs that my keepers said were supposed to stop it. How I discovered politics and stopped doubting myself so much and started doubting the system. How I found the mad people's liberation movement, having first grounded myself in the gay liberation movement. How I think crazy people are often full of love and wonder and imagination and really wonderful ideas until the system gets us. How our sensitivity and creativity should be nurtured and expressed, rather than being suppressed by the pseudoscience of psychiatry. How unfair it is that once we're labelled all feelings are likely to be seen as symptoms, behaviour other than quiet compliance is always suspect, and neither we nor anyone else is ever likely to trust our judgement again. How the drugs we are given for our metaphorical diseases cause real diseases.

I've always been prejudiced against organizations composed of the family members of "the mentally ill," since what I've known them to do is lobby for laws that would allow their loved ones to be more easily incarcerated and drugged. I had now idea how Sally was going to react to what I was telling her.

When I was done she took my hand and said, "Thank you. You've given me hope."