TRANSCRIPT
Have you heard of this thing lately where mental health professionals, doctors, psychiatrists, perhaps even therapists can assist people in killing themselves for mental health reasons? It’s becoming more popular in certain countries of the world. And I have had a few people reach out to me in the last few years who are considering it. Some who are really even considering it legally, going through all the different stages of getting signatures from doctors and therapists and psychiatrists saying that suicide is the best mental health option for them. Suicide by some sort of injection or pill by the help of the mental health system.
And a few people have asked that I make a video about this. And here goes. I think it’s horrible. I think it’s crazy. I think it’s terrible. I think it’s completely wrong. I think it goes against everything that the mental health system should be standing for. And I am going to explain why.
Let me just start with the people I’ve talked to who have reached out to me and told me their stories that actually bear a lot of similarities. So much overlap with the stories I’ve heard. It’s all people who were traumatized. All people who were traumatized as children, didn’t get loved properly. Same very similar to my own story. A lot of rejection and abandonment, pain, struggle in life. [sighs] And then mental health diagnosis, therapists who couldn’t quite help them very much, [sighs and gasps] um, medications to try to help their mental problems, so-called diagnosed mental problems, medications not working well, years and years and decades of despair, pain, rejection, alienation in society, and now this final option. Oh, maybe I can use the mental health system to kill me, to remove my life.
And one thing I have found interesting in all this, and I never heard anybody say it, is that in many, many ways, the mental health system, psychiatry in particular, but even psychotherapists in a lot of cases actually are already working on and long since have been working on the spectrum to help people kill themselves psychologically, emotionally. So much of the goal of psychiatry, of psychiatrists and therapists who go along with this is not to help people connect with the truth of who they are. Not to help them reclaim their feelings, not to help them grieve, but instead to shut down those feelings, to shut down their post-traumatic reactions.
Those post-traumatic reactions are labeled as symptoms. And when the mental health professional steps out of it and puts together the picture of those symptoms, those symptoms create the diagnosis. But really all they are is the person’s desperate striving to heal from whatever the hell they went through in their lives, especially their childhoods. Their depression and their sadness and their rage and their anxiety and their frustration and their despair and their pain, their confusion, their muddled thoughts, their inability to concentrate, their inability to connect well to other people, their inability sometimes to trust other people, to be paranoid of others. These are all signs of what happened to a person along the way in their life.
And so much of the mental health system is about taking those post-traumatic expressions, those feelings that related to what happened to them long ago, and splitting them off, getting the person to push them down, to get rid of them, to feel better, to say, “How is your anxiety today?” Oh, if your anxiety is worse, then you must be getting less healthy. And if your anxiety is going down through some technique I have taught you or perhaps through a pill that I have given you, if your anxiety is going down, then you must be getting better rather than, “Oh, you’re feeling a lot of anxiety because you’re feeling more of your feelings about what happened to you.” You’re remembering more about what happened to you.
Your deep inner true self is becoming legitimately enraged about how you were treated once upon a time, how you weren’t loved properly, how you were violated in all sorts of different ways. And you’re supposed to feel anxiety, and you’re supposed to feel more and more anxiety because guess what? When you were little and you were being traumatized and you were powerless and you were vulnerable and you were part of a family system and a world that supported that family system, the people who were traumatizing you were in control and they had power, and they didn’t want you to feel anything. They didn’t want to see your reactions or know your reactions or hear your reactions or hear the pain in your voice resulting from what they were doing to you. They wanted to shut you down.
And as you become open, as you become less shut down, you’re going to feel those feelings once again. And what does it say about a mental health system that gives pathological names to your healing process? That doesn’t recognize your healing process as a healing process? Suddenly when I started figuring that out long, long ago, I realized, wait a second, the mental health system in so many ways is on the side of the traumatizers in the family system.
I even saw it in the ugly little time that I worked in a mental hospital. I saw psychiatrists who were at the top of the food chain in the mental health system siding with abusive parents, even siding with parents who raped their child sometimes. Crazy stuff. They literally sided with the parents. They said, “Oh, this parent is the greatest support system in the life of their child who might even be an adult now. Oh, no. Just because there was a rape long ago, oh, the person has worked through that trauma, now we have to help bring this family together.” And then I started realizing, I mean, that was a big one. But I saw it again and again and again throughout the mental health system that this system is not healthy.
And so now when I hear about this new extreme treatment that the mental health system is providing, which is offering legal suicide to mental health clients who have refractory problems that never get well, all I see is this is just a continuation of the spectrum of what the mental health system overall has always had, always has done, always has believed and stood for. There are some mental health professionals who are exceptions. They are the exceptional mental health professionals. There are not many of them. Not many that I have seen, and I’ve certainly met a lot of mental health professionals.
And for those exceptional ones, I like to put myself in the category of them, it’s not easy. It’s hard. They’re going against a whole system. They’re taking a lot of risks. Even the risk that I’ve seen some mental health professionals take, and I took with clients supporting them if they wanted to come off their psychiatric drugs. Even psychiatrists wanting to support clients coming off their psychiatric drugs. That was a risk.
And I haven’t been a therapist for more than 15 years ago. Now it’s becoming more common for mental health professionals to be supportive in this realm. But 15, 20 years ago, not much at all. Almost no literature about it at all and dangerous on the part of the therapist. Heaven forbid something goes wrong. Heaven forbid the person has too much of a reaction or too much drug withdrawal for coming down off their psych drugs too fast. Heaven forbid the person killed themselves.
This is something that a psychiatrist who I knew who helped quite a number of people come off psych drugs 20 years ago. This psychiatrist told me, he said, “If I help 500 people come off psych drugs and heaven forbid one person kills themselves in this process, I can lose my license even though I’ve helped successfully 499 people. But if I put 500 people on psych drugs and a hundred of them or 50 of them end up killing themselves as the result of toxic side effects of these psych drugs, well, that’s okay. I’ll never get in trouble at all because I provided them the best standard of care. What a crazy mental health system.
And now a crazy mental health system that is extending itself into helping people kill themselves as part of its standard of care. When I think about these things, I find myself very glad that I left that mental health system, that I don’t work in it, that I work outside of it, that I speak against it. And because I’m outside of it, I have more liberty to speak freely. And now, let me speak to anyone who might be thinking about killing themselves with the help of the mental health system.
Or on their own. First, I’d say please don’t do it. Please, please find some way to get support, maybe from others or from within your own self somehow to acknowledge that the horrible pain and despair and hopelessness you are going through is a reaction to what happened to you in your childhood and probably for decades of your life afterward.
That the world is sick and crazy and horrible and has bad ideals and is heading in the wrong direction, but it doesn’t mean that you have to. That death is not the necessary end point of this painful journey that so many of us are on. Yes, it’s painful. Yes, there’s no way around the pain. But this pain can help us grow. This pain is part of our growth process. [sighs] No matter how bad the pain is, the pain is always some sign of growth. It’s growing pains.
And so if we can keep that in mind and also know that if we keep staying alive, maybe we can be useful to others. If we can learn how to be useful to ourselves. If we can find a way out of our terribly despairing situations. And there’s always a way. Somehow, somehow there’s always a way out. That the world needs us. The world needs you. The world needs the courageous, strong few who can stay with their pain.
I’ll even take a speculative leap here that I think sometimes the people who are in the most pain and the most despair are actually healthier than the norm. Healthier than the average normal people who actually are just zombies ’cause they’re so shut down. They don’t feel pain. They don’t feel despair because they fit in. They are average. They have companions everywhere and they’re out of touch and they don’t know themselves and they don’t want to know themselves. And if they did know themselves, they would be in terrible despair.
So I only hope that anyone who is in terrible despair such that they are considering ending their lives can find some way to find value, enough value in their existence to keep it going for another day, another week, another month, another year, and maybe find their voice enough to speak, to find some place to speak, if only to help one other person.
Because that’s the other thing I know. Once one survives, once one finds a way to get meaning out of a meaningless existence, one becomes a sort of expert and can be very useful to other people. And my primary example of that, my primary model of that is my own self. Such a lost and sad and despairing and desperate person craving [snorts] something that I couldn’t find and didn’t know, but eventually started to connect with me.
And what I found is the more I connected with me, the more I found my voice, the more I could speak, honor life, not honor death, but honor life and speak out against those who honored death. And we’re leading people toward death. Leading people toward being more shut down, more split off, more zombied.
My life isn’t easy, but I can tell you one thing. I’m not a zombie. And you know, I wish there were fewer zombies in the world. I’d probably have a lot more allies and friends. But in the meantime, I keep plowing forward. And I wish the same for all of you.