Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 11:46:23 -0500
From: dpoole@awod.com (darrellyn sue poole) (by way of dpoole@awod.com (darrellyn sue poole))
Subject: Internet Counterculture
 
Recently on the MADNESS mailing list, an Internet mail group
operated by national advocate Sylvia Caras, someone objected to the use of
invective by posters of angry messages.
 
Some electronic users employ vehement language rarely encountered in
"polite" society...and with cause.
 
Many of the posters have been shut out of "polite" society and driven to
living like refugees in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
 
They have been warehoused in hellholes, forced to submit to institutional
infantilization and learned helplessness, brainwashed into thinking of
themselves as defective and inferior to "normal" persons and accused of
being "mentally ill."
 
Someone else said David Oaks, nationally-known C-S-X advocate and editor of
the alternative publication Dendron, is successful because he observes the
protocols of a dominant culture.
 
It is incumbent upon representative of the C-S-X movement to behave in
public as civilized, gracious human beings capable of rational thought.
David Oaks has a sense of humor and native intelligence...and his Harvard
education doesn't hurt, either.
 
Not all C-S-Xes are college graduates. Not all have credentials. Not all
even want to participate in polite society. Their diverse interactions
constitute a cyberspace counterculture.
 
Angry MADNESS posters use invective because their emotional sufferings got
them tangled in a system that chews them up and spits them out stigmatized,
without resources, with no way to get back lives devastated more by the
brutality of systemic treatment than by the orginal trauma.
 
Every new horror story... of pregnant women forced into ECT and given
megadoses of psychotropic drugs, of millions of children with different
learning styles targeted for Ritalin therapy...underscores the waste of time
and talent, the enforced isolation. Many MADNESS posters, institutionally
identified as defectives with psychiatric histories, cannot expect the
common courtesies, opportunities and choices "normal" Americans take for
granted.
 
Many have lost forever their Fourteenth Amendment rights, so they are
resorting on MADNESS to their First Amendment rights, hoping their justified
indignation will be heard, accepted and understood.
 
They are human beings with a common cause: seeking alternatives to brutality
and oppression in society and within the mental health system, which is
largely responsible for limiting their opportunities and choices.
 
Tolerance and acceptance prevail on MADNESS, while in society at large
C-S-Xes must mask and subdue their outrage, playing the political games of
conciliation and "appropriateness," giving unmerited deference to the
powers-that-be...who are often public sevants living comfortably on our tax
dollars while responding to C-S-Xes with rudeness, substandard services,
coercion, condescension, arrogance or mere silence.
 
The anger stems from being invalidated and perceived as "crackpots" by the
powers-that-be regardless of skills, credentials, goals, achievements, work
ethics. Being ghettoized, criminalized and isolated generates outrage,
particulary when strengths and abilities have been negated by political
social control practiced by a corrupt and self-serving system operating as a
cult of the "disease model."
 
MADNESS is a cyberspace counterculture peopled by truth-tellers opposing
systemically-imposed insanity. As dissident psychiatrist R.D. Laing noted,
madness has been invented by the powerful to render threats to the system
invisible and impotent. Thus, those who refuse to conform to the oppressive
dynamics of a xenophobic society are institutionalized, their lives reduced
to invented diseases and demeaned in the mechanistic jargon of psychiatry.
 
The outraged have valuable perspectives to offer. In the interests of free
speech, tolerance, appreciation for differences and empathy for the
disempowered, the invective and vituperation are understandable.
 
Mainstream psychiatry is about social control and preservation of an
oppressive status quo.
 
MADNESS is about free speech, human acceptance, change, alternatives and
open minds...a desperately needed counterculture.
 
- by Sue Poole
 
****Personal info: Award-winning Charleston, South Carolina journalist
unemployed because of psychiatric coercion and consequent stigma.