New voice...

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If I am getting health, within my limits, it is only because I believed in myself. I woke up one day and realized that I wasn’t “mentally ill” in the traditional sense, and that I would have to do all the work myself, if I wanted to survive. Recovery simply wasn’t built into the mental health system. It was designed by “Big Nurse” to warehouse the very lost and battered; to avoid paying the true expenses of taking care of those with PTSD, though it wasn’t called that at the time. I give the most credit to the Eugene Rescue Mission where I lived for years. It helped because it wasn’t connected to the mental health system. No one there forced me to take drugs that dulled my mind, no one there labeled me crazy or defective. I had a cot in a large dorm, simple food, and a very simple job folding newspapers for their recycling program. Let me repeat that: I was aided the most by someone giving me sanctuary from the highly degreed shrinks and their soul-shriveling labels. I lived among equals, men who were equally damaged, distant ghosts unbound by family or relationships. ...

I don’t have degree from Yale or Harvard, but I would match the education I received in Norwich State Hospital, Northamption VA Hospital, the Eugene Mission, and years on the street, with the education of any psychiatrist. I sat in the Mission and the hospitals and, within limits, learned what terror and horror and hopelessness felt like. I watched where it came from, how impossible it is to get rid of (broken hearts never heal), and above all, I learned that we are remarkably resilient, we human beings, if we get a chance to relax and relearn love. Recovery isn’t about being “cured”, as many of us never had a disease in the first place. It is about relearning to love who we really are, and to accept the daily burden of our struggle as just something we share with most other humans.

Source: Hugh Massengill: Madness is a Doorway We Ourselves Create


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