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Community Traumatization & Human Transformation: An Outsider Philosophy
By Kathleen M Hill
ISBN: 978-1-904697-44-2
Published: 2005
Pages: 37
Key Themes: North American author, empowerment, mental health sevices, journal, activism
Description
Ranting out the Devil is a compilation of reflections on discovery pertinent to health and the human service industry unique to mental health. Ranting represents my journal of healing from an episode of tumultuous mental distress into an engaged, functioning recovery. My evolving internalised state of peace and wellness abreacted out of Ranting’s dynamics for understanding, acceptance and activism impacting against life’s loss. I combined survivor art with Ranting to express purpose, meaning and value, because reasoning is the combined action of both the intellect and emotion processing a viable conclusion and the greatest part of reason is creativity that touches that most alive part of us – the depth of our personal power. This book provides an extremely emotive and honest account of Kathleen’s view of mental health professionals. She has empowered many patients who have suffered in hospital. She has provided mental health patients with a voice.
About the Author
Kathleen is an inspirational figure in the global service user/survivor movement. Kathleen lives in Canada, thus showing Chipmunka’s global reach.
Book Extract
Abusive ‘Helping’ Professionals who offend do so by using cognitive distortions to meet personal needs, protect themselves from aversive self-awareness, and overcome internal inhibitions against coercively engaging consumers of services into re-traumatizing activity with paternalistic authority. These offenders carefully groom their victims by systematically separating them from their families and peers, and socializing them into a life-style of solitary confinement found otherwise only on ‘death row’. Offenders justify the abuse by making excuses and redefining their actions as empathy and mutuality. Throughout the process, offenders exploit the power imbalance inherent in all human service professional, provider-consumer relationships. “With abuse, you suffer loss of soul, loss of self and loss of meaning” K.W. (Survivor) from Community Retraumatization
“Patient memoirs are a kind of protest literature, like slave narratives or witness testimonies.” Gail A. Hornstein
Nemesis
Daughter of Night; Daughter of Moral Conscience
In Greek mythology Nemesis was the winged goddess of retributive justice, righteous anger, divine vengeance, and usually a victorious rival. She inflicted the justice of the gods on the proud and those who flaunted the law avenging those who were wronged. Originally, an abstraction of righteous indignation against evil, this idea was later personified as Nemesis, goddess of divine justice and vengeance. Her anger is directed toward human transgressions of the natural, right order of things and the hubris behind it. Nemesis pursues the insolent and the wicked with inflexible vengeance. Her cult is thought to have originated from Smyrna. She is also considered to have been the mother of Helene after impregnation during her rape by Zeus. Excerpted from http://ww.theoi.com)
Asylum, Haven, Refuge, Sanctuary
I once saw a picture on the Internet of a vanquished Afghan woman (reared by the Taliban and living in a war zone) holding her pre-school daughter in her arms. She wanted someone to help her: She wanted to go to an insane asylum, because she could no longer cope: She said, “I think I am going crazy!” Although our circumstances are different, her statement, a direct quote of mine, reminded me of myself back in ’94.
I thought that I was doing the ‘right’ thing, hence what was best for my family by signing myself onto psych ward. I did not understand that my cry for ‘help’ was a direct consequence of absorbing corporate sponsored, state controlled established mental ‘health’ systemic propaganda. Instead, I considered my act of ‘help-seeking’ to be the correct form of escape from untenable emotional distress in the short-term and as such, a renewal of spiritual strength and endurance, a necessity to my psychological well-being, hence supportive of family and community. My purpose in short-term ‘help-seeking’ while in psychic crisis (psychological collapse) was to gain admittance into an asylum, a haven, a refuge, a sanctuary and to become again fully functional. I viewed my action of ‘help-seeking’ to be a protest and dissent to overwhelming mental and emotional crisis resulting in loss of functionality. It was the first time and the last time that I sought ‘help’ for my psychological well-being from the established mental ‘health’ system, whose ulterior motives based in conflict-of-interest discount any person-directed support based in principles of self-determination and assisted decision-making.
The operative ethic in the term ‘mental health institution’ is asylum, which I thought meant haven, refuge, sanctuary. In googling psychiatric consumer-survivor and in joining peer support groups on the Internet, I have discovered that I am not alone in my past adverse experiences in an established mental ‘health’ system based upon the pseudo science of bio psychiatry, the antithesis of person-directed support. My present fears concern the potential abuses, sometimes severe of future others who will fall victim to misleading, commercial propaganda into the false beliefs of psychiatry. In bio psychiatry personhood is not understood in terms of autobiographical history and social/political circumstances. There is no ‘mind’ for ‘healing’ and ‘recovery’ in psychiatry. Instead individuals suffering from psychosocial disability, emotional distress, disturbing behaviour (protest reaction) and unusual thoughts or perceptions receive medical intervention for neurobiological disorders (mental ‘illness’) rather than to recognize and acknowledge their behavior as adaptive to their personally relevant social context. Clearly, there need be no escape in an ‘idealized’ society. Obviously, the fault lies within the biology of the individual!
Also Available
‘Little Davey: View Reality’ by Kathleen M. Hill
e-Book
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Maria Altmann (verified owner) –
“RANTing OUt the Devil” is Kathleen M. Hill’s riveting account of how we all can free ourselves from acculturated restrictions and servitude. As Kathleen M. Hill reclaims her right and personal power to act with “self” through her book, Kathleen pro-actively transfers that right to us, by displaying the instantaneous and commanding value of self-factualisation.
Kathleen M. Hill demonstration as a writer is obvious, exciting and engagingly vivid. Kathleen executes action upon by candidly doing. Here, Kathleen shows how we might ‘rant out our own devil’ all the way through self-determination. Kathleen grants us directive acquiescence by reclaiming the right to choose our own fate through choice and liberty, without compulsion.
Kathleen M. Hill’s expression is creative, energetic and self-empowering. Foremost Kathleen affords us a passage, course, and route. Kathleen’s book delivers us a healing process by accepting as true; the onus of self fulfilment through a goal of retrieving and believing in one’s human potential.
I felt liberated by Kathleen M. Hill’s “RANTing Out the Devil”. It is a master thesis having embryonic clarification in the way it encompasses the need for holism through consciousness by giving impartial credence to humanity’s daily felt-experience of living, feeling-thought and reasoning.
Clearly, as Kathleen capitulates, “…with our natural world a mirror for our socio-political collapse, we need to devise mechanisms for the creation of partnerships, whose ulterior motivation, hence conflicts-of-interest become the binding ethic for peer review and positive action rather than peer conflict and our destruction”.
I recommend this book to everyone and not just anyone who feels dis-empowered, trapped by welfare discriminations or any other situation namely; in assault of the Mental ‘health’ Industry and its ongoing callous indifference and “known” victimisations.
I call for those truly interested in humanity and particularly in the social, human, health, education, legal, government and cultural services to take this book wise, for it has intellectual, emotional and spiritual philosophical narrative perceptiveness, practical sensibility, pro-active responsiveness as well as a unique form of integrity.
“RANTing Out the Devil” by Kathleen M. Hill needs to be promoted in mainstream education everywhere for everyone. Specifically this book with its perspective of the “lived experience” needs to be adopted for real by practitioners and those involved in working legalistically in all areas of human science.
Let’s hope we see more work authored by Kathleen M. Hill. I believe Kathleen is a high quality, highly engaging and excellent writer.