The Agenda

The Agenda

Every morning we were given cocktails, even before breakfast, the subtle crunch of cornflakes or the warrior weetabix or even the pale porridge. Before that our nerves were handed over to the nurses, the pharmaceutical industry and each other. Despairing we would limp in the queue with eyes of wildfire and shock and would allow this journey to inhabit our days. Strange thoughts would wander about and sometimes they would go into the wrong head, or be heard in someone else's voice, singing like a caged canary or shouting like an ogre under a bridge. Landing punches in the air in the corridors or laughing uncontrollably at the funny things our voices said to us in our bedrooms. There were also the space cadets and the spiritual teachers or healers. I liked to think I was a little bit of everything. The most disturbed minds were locked away, but on this ward our locks were invisible, based on trust and pathetic protests and paper and promises to psychiatrists we despised.

Sometimes they would come in with their secret ingredients and magic, waving their medication wands and frowning compassionately before declaring that we were still too high, and needed more ravishing by their drugs, stodgy meals and pink bedrooms. They came without a cure and plenty of experimentation, some even claimed to use the cocktails full of secrets on themselves which they then vehemently denied. We, the mice ran freely in their eyes. We had superior but faulty wiring and they were the god like psychic, neuro dynamic electricians who could tinker with our brain chemistry. They forgot our holistic rights, our chakras, our energy, our poetry and our rights were mulched autumn leaves waiting for winter, hibernating in the hospitals, sleepy angels with demons all around us, laughing at the children of psychiatry.

For none of us knew our minds and a revolution choked under the weight of the medication. It was seething and bustling and rotting. A huge tangle of the limbs of the mind warbled about in the hospital, opening doors that should be closed, For instance, the utility room where I discovered an apparent hallucination of a steamy grip between the trusted ward manager and his nymph. Really, they needed some respiradone to become as a sexual as the rest of the zombies running under the same machine.

The nurses were a gang that ran riot on those who wished to escape. The mob would descend on a poor unfortunate, confusing them in terror with their deathly needles. They would descend like a giant spider and the soul would scream at the invasion. They would be carted off for electric shock treatment or delivered into a bare room with a plastic mattress and soft things on which they could land their despair. A lighter was kept on a string in the locked ward, in the office where we would ask if we could have a cigarette, the best thing we could do with our time.

None of us really knew anything of these secret ingredients, but there were enough secrets in these walls to fill the coffins that were being designed for us. They couldn't give us a cure because it wasn't lucrative enough, a selection of secret ingredients kept us under control and kept us ill and afraid so that we might invest in the next pill that might appeal with its blessings and curses. The injections were a cold death that stole around your mind like haunted wind, carrying the screams of patients becoming spectres. Under watchful eyes they moaned, screamed their darkest secrets and told their thought disordered stories.

The main character of this story is an entity called Psychiatry who is responsible for a large vacuum, a huge hole in the mind of the World. These days they have buried some of their entities, their drugs, in a safe place. They now know that they must fly the holistic wellbeing banner to survive. The very thing they have undermined for a long long time. People don't want an assumed unnatural quiet buried under the noise. They don't want torture and silence pervading the terrors waiting by their inner doors.

Meal times were the main event, apart from watching others lose their minds and the next cigarette. The clocks were bent and the hands independent of real time. They would move about, sometimes wiggle and the numbers would make up a strange psychosis that was hard to evade. My thoughts always were - was it the drugs that were doing this to me, or was it the strange landscape of my mind that was chattering to them, that ran the show. Because to me, it felt like the drugs were putting me in the rabbit hole. The doctors and nurses were the facilitators of this walking nightmare, some of them trying to put it to sleep. The Pharmaceutical Industry the rich drug lord behind it all. Behind the stealing of beauty and freedom in the minds of others.

This world has a rich tapestry of suffering, The mental health system might become what it pretends to be, a compassionate system. New drugs, new attitudes and treatment. The disintegration of labels and separation, the mocking voice of Society. Perhaps we will always feel the need to lock each other up. Lets do it without pretence and abuse, do it with care, compassion and respect. Then one day the psyche of humanity will heal and we will liberate ourselves, like a sun casting its light on the dark.

Patients walk like shadows, hand in hand. Darkening the doors of Society they paint and write and talk until their minds give into the trauma they have endured. But they have a special place in the Arts where they can go and face their jailers and the monsters and demons. They can sit under the new moon with extra care and plan their lives. Live lives of pure beautiful lunacy once they have cleared up the mess that was made of them. Evolution is transformative.

By Maddi Smith-Nelson