Today would have been my mother’s 59th birthday.  I miss you, Gail Susan Harris, 13 years since you passed on.  Poet, priestess, visionary, artist, friend, lover, and mother - you live in my heart always.  As the lines to one of my many poems written in your honor said:

You breathed out what was left of your fight into me. 
I’m hoping that somewhere, you’re finally free.

This blog has typically emphasized the personal over the political, but I need to say here that my mother’s death was not just personal but political.  I believe that she was a casualty of a lifetime of psychiatric abuse.  From the age of 18, she was victimized by forced psychiatric treatment and indiscriminate use of psychiatric medications to subdue her spirit.  Many times she tried to resist the treatment that was being forced upon her, which numbed her mind and spirit, but she was accused of being a noncompliant patient and hospitalized against her will for her “schizophrenia” and “bipolar disorder.”  I believe that nothing was ever actually wrong with my mother and that she was made disabled by the medications she was forced to take over the years, which effect permanent brain damage.

She was one of the first Zyprexa “guinea pigs” — a powerful neuroleptic medication which has now been proven to have many dangerous side effects.  Among these are obesity and diabetes, which were the exact causes of her death. 

As I’ve written about before, I am committed to raising awareness about the dangers of Big Pharma and psychiatry and the abusive use of psychiatric medications.  I’ve been educating myself more about the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD), which emphasizes the right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.  Under the CRPD, people have the right to refuse treatment and forced treatment is considered a form of torture.  The US has not yet ratified the CRPD - you can learn more about it at www.ratifynow.org.

Finally, let’s make sure to take good care of each other and to do what we can to make this world a saner place.  Let’s build a world where it’s safe to go crazy, and better yet, let’s build a world that doesn’t drive people to madness.