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Title: Letter into the Void Author: Anonymous Date: Autumn 2019 Language: en Topics: despair, mental health, psychiatry, Fernweh, Munich, The Local Kids, The Local Kids #5 Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 5 Notes: First appeared as Brief ins Nichts in Fernweh (Anarchistische Strassenzeitung, MĂĽnchen), Issue 31, August 2019
We live a life that condemns us to death from the beginning. We’re born
with the certainty of our end. And this life that demands so much from
us, that loads so much weight on our shoulders, that resists our free
choices and actions, can lead quite a few to pull the emergency brakes
prematurely, when no strength and joy can be found to carry on the
prescribed path to its end.
The impotence, disgust and exhaustion from existence can also stem from
something outside of society, but I want to point to the social
relations that give rise to the individual circumstances that drive the
individual to suicide.
The lack of emotions and sensations seems to be a rather legitimate
reaction to a surrounding that seeps a deep grey into our perceptions.
Tied down by constraints - money, efficiency, exploitation - we’re kept
away from the places, persons and experiences that we long for. We’re
trotting along worn out paths instead of making our own discoveries,
deviations and orientations. This is a world in which our paths channel
us through a sea of concrete and asphalt, in which our senses are
tortured, in which we cannot call time our own. In which each morning
the alarm clock wakes us from dreams full of promise. We get driven from
A to B in overloaded means of transport. And each evening we stumble
totally exhausted into bed. While too often the money in the bank
account even isn’t enough for the rent. The question of meaning – in
which the desire for life can push back the aversion of mere survival –
doesn’t seem to be possible to be answered in this constant fight for
survival and conservation. In Germany each year around 10,000 persons
commit suicide, and depression and burn-out seem to be the diseases of
the 21st century. Doesn’t that make us understand that we’re not
deranged, but the conditions in which we’re living are?
Our inexisting freedom and the alienation of our lives are so
all-encompassing that even our death, our end cannot lie in our own
hands. Suicidals are chastised as deserters; moral repression and social
norms are the consequences. If we’re anyhow here then we seem to be
forced to submit to our duty to live. How can we expect from tired,
exhausted and haggard persons that they discover joy and an appetite for
life – for which the only alternatives seem to be some pharmaceuticals
or rehabilitation measures – for a life that isn’t ours?
Human misery, the painful process of converging and separating,
venturing into new ways, changing ourselves or making choices... all are
vulnerable moments; we can feel confused, overpowered, intimidated,
crippled or lonely. Most particularly when we are persuaded that we
cannot comprehend our own feelings, reactions and motives, that our own
power of judgement is unreliable, that our mental processes are false
and that we can only have hope of betterment through the aid of experts.
Through the assignment in categories like “normal” and “abnormal” can
the fear of being “sick” or not “normal” lead to paranoia. The fear of
losing your social surroundings, of being seen as a burden or just of
somehow being locked up. Agonies, “mental illness”, feelings of – for
example – alienation, loneliness and isolation are the destructive
consequences of a society that suffocates our individuality. The belief
that it is somehow “false”, that it should be “corrected” (or at least
suppressed) can only lead to the self-alienation of people and to
feeling themselves to be miserable and worthless. However, mental
illness and their diagnostic categories are societal constructions. The
border between the norm (“normality”) and deviation (“mental illness”)
is partly a random attribution, based on conventions. While new
legislation is drawn up constantly, to ever more tighten the corset of
legality, new mental disorders are “discovered” to create new categories
of “madness”, to open up new markets for the pharmaceutical industry and
to force people into an always smaller spectrum of “healthy”. Also the
new police mandates show how tightly intertwined these two things are –
the repressive, policing structuring of the outside, the material world
and the inner, mental world. The “Bavarian
Mental-Illness-Assistence-Bill” foresees that any cop can lock up in a
psychiatric institution someone who causes trouble or doesn’t fit in the
picture.
Psychiatry is a repressive instrument, equipped with state and police
power, with locks and bars, with psychotropic drugs and tools of
torture. It incorporates a certain idea, namely the assumption that the
individual is a carrier of an invisible illness or an inherited strain
which can be discovered by experts and “healed” through the use of
force. Psychiatry becomes a means of social control and state power,
endowed with authority, and which denies the individual with its own
will and desires. For example the heretics, witches, prostitutes,
“deranged” and in fact all “social deviants” who where “treated”
(tortured, exorcised, burned) by the Inquisition, shows well how the
myth of “mental illness” is used by the system to repress. It is claimed
that one is possessed by demons, which should be driven out and
eliminated by whatever coercive means. Some switched from witch-hunting
to psychiatry when the church began to lose its power, to basically do
the same work; to take on the “possessed” and to try to adapt them to
the societal standards. These standards change over time and space.
Behind the ideas of mental health and mental illness is a massive
industry. A total surveillance system with closed sections and
corresponding means; security personnel and technological devices,
manufacturers of tools for recording, controlling and electroshocking
and of course the pharmaceutical industry itself.
How can we recover, become “healthy” in a world that is sick, in
institutions that lock us up, make us swallow drugs against our will and
deny our own will? We cannot expect to find joy and wholeness without
changing our surroundings, without changing this dreary reality. Every
real, profound change also means necessarily a change of society as a
whole. This society in which we can only choose between holding out or
caving in, has to die so that we can live. So that we can take each
others hand in the madness of being, without constraint or pressure.