I thought about how accusations of paranoia are used to silence the truth. I thought about what happens when the pain of rejection is invisible, minimised or denied. I thought about what happens when trauma is expressed as mental illness. I thought about what happens when the “ill” person becomes the focus of investigation instead of the society that inflicted the blows. Who benefits from this oversight? Who loses?

Adjusting My Vision

Sometimes the eye-doctors need to examine their own eyes. Sometimes the world needs to reframe what it sees. Sometimes the blind spots need the spotlight. Sometimes the healing begins when the selective vision that focuses on the perpetrators’ masterful illusion is broadened. Childhood trauma has a way of repeatedly drawing the sensitive child’s eyes towards very real dangers, towards discrimination that the world refuses to see. Society says society is okay. Society says that the traumatised mentally ill person is scary or weird or crazy or lazy or spoiled. Society says that something is wrong with that person and they need to be fixed, corrected, medicated and made normal. They are labelled as defective, weak, pampered and privileged as they’re drowning.

But isn’t there something wrong with the burden this person has to carry because something is wrong in the world this person lives in? In this story of madness, who is mad? Is society mad? Can mental illness be a normal person’s reaction to society’s sickness, society’s madness, society’s hate, a terrible injustice in society? 

I am flawed; my family is flawed. We are products of a seriously flawed world. Being flawed and the inflictor of so much pain, the world has no right to point the finger at me or my family and stigmatise us.

Your privileged shall become our cheap labour

History class in school involved crafting poems of pleasure in my head as I stared too intently at the blackboard, pretending to listen to the dry-facts drone of my least favourite teacher. I was a model student. At least I came across that way.

Later in my adult life, I would drift across the history that school had not taught me. These were neglected histories that became lifelines I had desperately needed as a child. In these self-taught history lessons, there was drapetomania, a “mental illness” behind Black slaves’ desire to flee captivity. In neglected histories, I would learn how colonial settlers in Kenya classified Africans’ desire for independence as mental illness. In the history they never taught me in school, I would learn that only Africans who received a western education developed schizophrenia. I would read about how the leading once-respected colonial physician, Gordon, arrived at the conclusion that Africans were uneducable, and prone to mental illness, because education caused too much intellectual pressure on the brain. This fact of scientific racism was clearly designed to support education policy in the colony – deny education to Africans because they were needed to perform menial jobs. I would learn that Black people globally are over-diagnosed with schizophrenia. I would learn that Black men in the U.S. civil rights movement were over-diagnosed with paranoia and schizophrenia. I would learn that schizophrenia is said to be genetic even though there is no genetic test that confirms schizophrenia. I would learn that some cultures around the world see psychosis as a natural reaction to long-term trauma. This was consistent with what I had observed in my brothers. My discomfort with schizophrenia, and anything that placed the burden for society’s ills on the unproven genetic make-up of the individual, would grow. I was uncomfortable with the questionable evolution of science in matters of the mind.