Written by The day I learned I was “mad” was also, strangely, the day I realized I could be loved. I basically learned just how bad my mind could get and it wasn’t so bad in the end, the local cable was talking to me, that’s all. I didn’t hurt anybody or embarrass myself too much. It was OK. I could pass on these genes after all.
That was the first time I was brought to Bellevue hospital, 5 to 6 years ago. Bellevue Asylum is one of the oldest and most prominent mental health institutions in the Caribbean. It is supported by the government in order to maintain the mental stability of Jamaican citizens. The institution has been in decline since COVID.
I barely recall my stay there the first time, I merely recall someone having a child with my uncommon name.
6 years later…
In December of 2023 I had the perfect opportunity to culminate a project I had around synchronicity, numerology and the numbers 1, 2, 3. 1 for the money, 2 for the show, 3 to pull me back out of the undertow.
The date 12.31.23.
I went home early that New Year due to being friendless and sad. I got sexually harassed when I tried to make something of the night.
Jamaica is a middle income nation of black people mostly. I am a dark-skinned, pansexual femme from rural Jamaica with no inheritance except land (if I am still on the title) and the associated debt. I care a lot about climate and sustainability.
I make music, write books, make games, dabble in performance art and sensual art and anything else that makes me have fun and feel alive. My mother supports this and my education.
I, in turn, avoid fossil fuels as much as possible. By not existing outside of the house, I do not use oil, gas and plastic more than necessary. I lived majority of my 20s stationed in one place, not driving. I would use public transportation and slow travel for education. I tried to cost as little as possible and maximize every move. I have become so efficient that one can hardly identify a move I make that does not serve multiple purposes.
I am a world citizen despite my Jamaican background, having lived in the US and Europe in youth and young adulthood.
Most recently, I lived in Germany for 5 years studying Gender and Diversity and working on my climate project which eventually won a couple prizes, got government funding and placed in an accelerator program.
All of this to say: I am somebody. I am somebody’s child, very loved and somewhat accomplished. I have always had great expectations upon me and it has never felt like a burden or undoable. I have always been confident about my future success. Less sure about love.
I write all this from bed 16 on Ward 2 at Bellevue Hospital for the mentally ill. I call myself neurodiverse or neuro-spicy when in the mood.
When I was first brought into Bellevue this time around (my 3rd psych ward hospitalization) I was scandalized. Ward K1 was full of cases of abuse, and escalations, and bickering.
If you slept in too long you could expect your mattress to be flipped in the shared dorm. If you were violent yes, but also impolite, you were tied to your bed and most times injected.
I got brought in because I was having a serious-feeling cardiac episode but could not shut up about climate. I had had the same heart episode back in December but I did not get it treated because my mother had tricked me into going to the Ward 21 psych ward when I thought I was going to rehab for cigarettes earlier that month.
I was instead restrained by my left foot and right hand and a white nurse I did not like made me take pills I did not want. What followed was a small horror.
I was brought into the psych ward, drugged, and held against my will because I had been experiencing a sort of telepathy that I could not explain – though I tried.
I needed a psych ward. But not through violence. Because that is what forcing someone to imbibe substances they do not want is. Violence.
In my experience, mental health patients love talking about mental health. But health. Not pharmaceuticals. They are not synonymous.
Medication for bipolar and schizophrenia cause liver and kidney damage, dizzy spells, diabetes, slurred speech and other issues. If there is one thing a black person does not need it’s exposure to more causal factors for diabetes.
Diabetes is a horrible disease with the word ‘die’ in the name to add insult and nervousness to injury – it should be renamed. You have to draw your blood everyday to check if you’re dying fast or slow. Many patients on the wards are diabetic. I have been pre-diabetic, saved by German medicine.
And diabetes is an interesting parallel to draw. Both diabetes and chronic mental illnesses are due to the body no longer producing something it needs for normative outcomes. The medicine for both causes as much pain as the disease on some level too. With mental health you either have to stop your medicine to have children or risk adverse health effects, making you a less viable partner for long-term relationships, even after mental health struggles.
They don’t care about that at Bellevue. Injections are administered at the slightest provocation, especially for disrespect. Nurses don’t take disrespect. They are not paid enough and they are scared of us.
We would be less scary if we got care we actually wanted but they don’t know what to do when we are having episodes and refuse to acknowledge a problem. I have a proposed fix but that’s for later.
For now, let’s pretend the Bellevue way is done with good intentions but internalized anti-blackness that provokes insults, abuse and gruffness as well as fear of the consequences of forceful medication get in the way. Nurses have to climb on top of patients to administer injections and cajole us into taking pills when we first arrive.
I’ll elucidate the anti-blackness and cases of abuse. One part is what is permitted by law. Patients can be hunted down in their homes like runway slaves and brought in for the crime of not inhabiting the agreed upon reality. You are locked away and guarded. Family members and lovers can turn you in. Our crimes are mostly: talking a lot and to things and beings that shouldn’t converse, having too good a time, having too bad a time, being very suspicious of the world, and, often, getting raped. Both women and men.
The first thing they do to a potential rape victim who does not submit wordlessly to being technically incarcerated is take away their body autonomy again. For those who are suspicious of the world, the outside gets in. And you just have to take it because you’re black, bad things happen to us and we sink or swim. No favors or handouts more than necessary.
Because you are black, you can handle coarse language, you’re used to it, aren’t you? And who cares about a little physical roughness, you’re not chained and whipped anymore be grateful. If these nurses were working with white people under the very same legal structure as Jamaica, the treatment would be gentler and more careful. That is a fact. I know because at UWI Hospital, a white man was placed in the mental health section and he was the only one who was not restrained.
Abuses took place despite the atmosphere of ‘it could be worse, take this free healthcare as a blessing’ – forced upon you sure but a blessing nonetheless.
Upon my entry I was panicked. I had heard about a medicine for schizophrenia that stopped the body from regulating heat properly. This meant climate change would kill us first if poverty from being unemployable during a crisis did not. It would also mean that my climate work would be about saving my life predominantly and not about passion and the fun of a global challenge. Not cool. Literally.
I wound up injected against my will for giving rude but helpful climate advice to UWI hospital staff at the top of my lungs. I couldn’t help it. After 10 years in the field, I finally saw the whole picture and it was colossal.
Soil and groundwater diminishing, weather unpredictability disturbing crops, a heating atmosphere, visa laws preventing migration from danger and so much more. Coming to the hospital, they wanted to put me on a plastic bed with a cotton sheet. I did not want to. There are a lot of fossil fuels in medicine. I panicked. They escalated.
I spoke about my heart condition, tied to the plastic bed. I had to sit and wait for care overnight. I kept insisting: It’s my heart. Heart comes first in the emergency room. Grey’s Anatomy taught me that. They did not give it urgency as psych cases can present physical symptoms.
Next day I was transferred without notice or consent to Bellevue Hospital. I had to ask where we were going mid-drive, I thought it was to the cardiac unit.
Once there, I was held in the waiting section. My father is neurodiverse and the few times we talk I kinda get him. So when the patient beside me who had been hit by a car lay on the ground I could understand and explain to the nurse that that’s where he last felt alive. He got up on his own later.
I went in for my intake interview and was terse. I explained: the last time I was here I said I would make this place obsolete and I have succeeded.
I make games as I said but in the genre of ‘Serious Games.’ One of my games ‘The Stellar’ is a therapy game for climate anxiety that is in the commons and can therefore be adapted for other traumas.
I make exclusively climate oriented games. The Stellar helps detail Freudian Slips with a special syntax, gradate delusions in terms of probability and place in space-time, help one accept and forgive megalomania in the self, look into body horror in a future less about machines because they are killing us and more about bodies as resources, and finally climate-related problems that that players have to reach consensus via roleplay, trying to fix the world.
It still needs playtesting but the aim is to make group therapy at Climate Cafés more fun.
Did I mention there’s erotica? There is erotica in the story book but the body horror makes it decidedly unsexy. :p
This game, alongside care farm communities – a concept popularized by the Dutch – can transform mental healthcare if we let it, it’s not so grandiose to think so.
I take inspiration from the latest Matrix film, terrible as it was, the idea of the therapist helping to keep the Matrix of capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist realism alive is very true. Most trauma that induces mental illnesses (and lifestyle diseases) comes from these culprits. And yet your psychologist wants to blame your parents and your psychiatrist wants to throw drugs at it.
Drugs you pay for. Drugs that are incomplete because they need to deal with side effects before going to market when they are that severe. Diabetes also needs extensive work. It is not complete.
But back to Bellevue, at the end of my intake in which I was terse due to the meat bag treatment, I asked for my heart to be checked by the doctor who felt disrespected. She listened to my heart and said it was beating fine, resentfully ending saying: “Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum” mockingly. My heart was convulsing. It was not funny.
At the end of the interview she said to the porter: “We’re finished.” And to me it sounded like a prequel to The Stellar, double entendre (a trademark of the game) and all.
As far as I was concerned, this was the beginning of the end of this type of psychiatry that didn’t see us neurodiverse as failing healers, medicine people, shamans, and doers to be rescued, instead just a problem to society or someone who was irreversibly damaged.
Let’s not mistake things: Bellevue aims to heal. They do it tough and military-style but they get results mostly because patients forget their time there due to the drug haze. Nurses work rain or shine, holiday or no, and they buy presents for patients come Christmas time.
But it is still full of abuses and despite articles detailing these abuses nothing much gets done because Jamaicans don’t really agitate for change, they move. Migrate. Internalized anti-blackness makes us distrust organizing with fellow citizens, suspecting it will be too much bother.
I got brought into Ward K1 and I wanted out. I hated my life. Everything was wrong and if I tried talking honestly, something I do rigorously, I sounded stupid.
The internet is spying on me. I’m probably being ghostwritten into TV shows and songs. And there’s a 1% chance Russia, Korea and me are involved in COVID.
I sound idiotic. I know. However things just keep happening and the movie ‘Parasite’ came out after my 1st psychosis where I saw a Korean man set a Chinese finger trap and I warned my social media followers of increased pandemics. I spoke about a white person’s implied comment about people and their smells at my international university on a Facebook group, and suddenly ‘Parasite’ has the wealthy talking about poor people and their smells and as a result the middle class basically catch a cold.
You can’t smell when you have COVID.
The whole story has an internal logic and this is the type of thing neurodiverse people bear in their minds every day and are trying to medicate away. How do you medicate an internally-logical conspiracy theory? I believe intensive talk and more readily available forensic psychiatry would help immensely but under capitalism the cost of that service would be prohibitive.
In any case, because I exist within the confines of capitalism I simply walk around with 1% vigilance for the remote possibility these things are true. I think negligible background worry affected my heart, like water eroding a stone.
I was mad. I punched at anyone who approached once I was on the ward for acute patients at Bellevue. I had learned from a fistfight with my mom that fighting doesn’t have to hurt.
The nurses pummeled each limb until I was restrained. No de-escalation skills. I felt stretched out like Christ on a cross, punished for being disruptively good. Dressed in a synthetic fabric nightgown and plastic diaper, FKA Twigs sang “All wrapped up in Cellophane” in my head. St. Vincent sang to me: “You’ve got pay your way in pain!” There’s no reward for abstaining from capitalism. I in turn sang a ho’oponopono forgiveness song to the nurses to apologize and calm down. I did not want that overheating drug.
The nurses don’t tell you what they are giving you before they give it. Injections are just forced.
I was not restrained again. The next few weeks I witnessed and experienced abuse.
There was a low-verbal patient, she just could not find her words. There was a pregnant patient. I’ve forgotten most cases of abuse except for a few where it was pure anarchy, there was no line drawn and anything went. The low-verbal girl fought the pregnant girl twice and both times the nurses stood back and watched for a bit, entertained and egging on their favorite (the pregnant girl of course but still). They were also protecting themselves. There was no move to call security. They separated it themselves.
When the pregnant girl started complaining of side pains, one of the nurses mocked her into silence about it. I was scandalized and made the mistake of looking at the nurse for too long.
She had complimented me on my ‘bright eyes’ before. She didn’t like them trained on her.
Soon after she told me to wash my hair. The shampoo they had contained egg protein and I was a recent raw vegan. I said I could not use that shampoo. She lost her temper and attempted to throw it on my head anyway.
“No egg!” I insisted, batting her hand away impulsively. “I’ll use the body soap,” I said, going into the shower.
She followed me and I saw what she was going to do before she did it. She filled the bucket used to flush the toilet and hold rags with feces from diaper patients and filled it with shampoo and water. She splashed me from behind and it went in my eyes which were bloodshot after.
That day she forced me to join praise and worship (oh yes, there’s forced Christianity too) and she commented gleefully: “You have blood inna yuh eye!”
That low-verbal patient regained her speech and even had the presence of mind to guide me through a short meditation when I realized I would have to apologize to the nurse because I had acted out of character and clumsily insulted her with a non-existent slur. I hated her but I could not stoop to her level. I had to clear my conscience and be the bigger person.
That same nurse shoved a combattive and disoriented stroke victim to the ground and splashed her in the face with water, a signature. Yet again, that nurse, when trying to restrain a resistant patient used the metal studded restraint to whip the patient like the slave master who gave her her last name. When I say it is internalized anti-blackness I mean even down to that level.
She loved to tell patients: “Don’t f*** yourself,” to wrap up a restraint session. She had a lackey who thought it a funny joke to use spray bottles on patients, spraying an adult woman in the face and cackling.
Abuse is tolerated at Bellevue.
I became incensed soon after arrival and interviewed patients with the intent to write this article.
One patient said they bully, inject and restrain you but they felt safe. There is an empty room they lock you in when you misbehave like a cage.
One patient said lots of people ‘go mad’ because of rape, women and also men who don’t know they have been assaulted because that vocabulary is not provided to men. She also said that if you go to a hospital, they should give you 3 days for your body before dealing with the mental. Reasonable.
One patient said nurses should respond to what we give, not what they think. The patient also wanted the world to know she wanted normal things; a house, a garden, etc.
Ideally, another patient said, you come to relax and heal your body and mind. Thinking about your environment, more peace, less violence, less cocaine, she said. What does that sound like but the deleterious effects of capitalism and the War on Drugs. Nowhere does she say: more serotonin. Mental health issues are rooted in lived trauma.
One patient had difficulty speaking clearly and said it was after the medication. She wanted to marry, she said. Her boyfriend brought her in. He lollygagged on picking her up when she was discharged.
Numerous abuses happen to patients in their homes. The hospital should be a break from this.
This same patient had physical health issues and therefore trusted medication more or less.
Food is important to patients. Not so much me anymore, too used to the European foreign student diet of not eating much in the day and saving up for a big dinner. But food is something Bellevue does well – except for all the meat which makes it basically unacceptable ethically, as well as the questionable water quality which is bleached to death and possibly creating superbugs as a result.
One patient faced a contradiction: the mood stabilizers were good but she did not like the medication.
That patient was an African American woman, detained at the airport on her way to start a business in Jamaica, so it could be you too – provided you’re black. She continued to say: “I’m not loving that they sleep at night,” speaking of the nurses who guarded the door of the women’s dormitory, sleeping in their section and us patients gathered in what I call “the pen.”
At night time I was always a part of the ‘night-time posse’ as I called us, waking up whenever the nurses noisily prepared for bed between 10pm and 12. My rest would be interrupted because one can only sleep so much and no more in a day. A patient was naked and screaming while the nurses slept, the African-American lady informed me.
One patient idealized that nurses would be trained in de-escalation tactics, that patients take responsibility for something like growing crops, crafting or doing chores; something productive rather than being restrained and doing more nothing.
At Bellevue you wake up, shower/brush teeth, get pressure and temperature checked (and sugar if diabetic), get meds, sing songs and pray, eat, have a doctor visit, snack, rest, pray, eat, rest, shower, snack, rest, sing and pray, eat, brush teeth, meds, sleep. Sometimes there’s group therapy, sometimes there’s music. Every day.
One patient had been coming since they were 18. She said it used to be worse. You couldn’t go outside and the food wasn’t as good.
An even older patient said she had come 20 times and had received electroshock therapy back in the day. It wasn’t that bad, she said.
One patient said it feels like a prison but she didn’t do anything bad.
There are longer term patients on Ward 2, people who were discharged but abandoned by family and, having nowhere to go, become wards of the state. I tried asking about the ideal care community with one of them but she just wanted out, there was no ideal.
None of this is healthcare I want. But I do have a vision I began to elucidate in The Stellar.
Let’s explore a Solarpunk and Lunarpunk future! (This is the fun part.) Solarpunk is what happens when nature and tech work together for the benefit of humanity. Lunarpunk is what happens to a Solarpunk society at night.
In The Stellar, neurodiverse people are found early and brought into special environments where they can learn about the mind and the numinous, our place in the world as a species and in the cosmos. Anyone has the ability to visit a Stellar for peer counseling and direction by a Ripe Scholar or a person in charge of ensuring Stellar acolytes are developing properly. By studying psychology, self-help and esoteric areas of exploration, people are able to push the limits of their minds in an environment developed just for this purpose. This is the vision I have of the future. But what of the present?
Care farms are a concept initiated formally by the Dutch. While I don’t believe farming has to be the main component, I do agree that time in nature, in an environment that exposes a patient who may distrust the world to the basic building blocks of life: food, this is something I wholeheartedly support.
I believe Bellevue is prime real estate to be a government created Climate Resilience Project to re-imagine mental healthcare and push boundaries for the world to learn from just as the Dutch did.
This Care Community would be in a city with added bonuses. For the safety of the project, let us assume patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism is on its way out which it kinda needs to be for our species to survive.
This Care Community would have to work to be self-sufficient in energy, water and food. Given that we have less than 60 years of arable soil left, we have to grow hydroponically. Given that we are water-insecure as an island with limited electricity to pump water, rain water catchment, groundwater pumping on solar and wind, and desalination all need to increase. Tidal power can also be used once we figure out how to avoid corrosion.
The pipes are plastic, however, and water trucks use fossil fuels but can be retrofitted with solar panels. There are, however, only so many resources for solar power and no more, and streets need lighting at night so I believe we should prioritize street lighting for solar resources in a place like Jamaica.
That leaves wells. Yeah. Wells. Don’t worry we can make them fancy. A USB charged UV Pulsar that pulses UV rays to sanitize water pumped out of the well in a bioplastic pipe made of durable materials reliant on water to retain integrity and biodegradable without water after a time. (The pipes and pulsar are imaginary).
The well is grilled to stop bodies falling in, with an opening for fetching water or pumping and it is mostly shaded by water-catching roofs that drain rain water in the well.
You can pump the water to crops to grow hydroponic leafy greens, cabbages, and CBD and other medicinal herb bases for natural medicine and value-added pharmaceuticals that reduce our reliance on shipping. Crops that produce/encourage/supplement serotonin and dopamine is what we are after, really, to combat bipolar and schizophrenia without damaging vital organs.
This would be a caretaking community with visitor’s quarters for month and a half long stays to pre-empt mental health episodes; and a conference building for paid out-patient events at a very affordable price, basically paying janitors and facilitators their fee, split across attendees. I don’t think events should cost more than $500 JMD (a bit less than $5 USD). A post-capitalist world is a de-inflated one, and if utilities are taken care of along with food (except for staples) the care community can be cheap.
Carers can be anyone from nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, PhD students, physiotherapists, historians, sex therapists, counselors, former nurses who can schedule well but don’t want to work, crafters, cooks, music therapists, sociologists, farmers, forensic psychiatrists and more.
The community has founding members in the care section who have permanent residences that they can do anything they want to them in order to make them climate resilient. And here is where I emphasize ‘anything.’ It is theirs. The most the government can ask is that they use the home as a part of a tour of climate resilient housing models.
Community income is therefore nuanced and can be decided upon by community members, voting direct democracy style and giving permanent residents a say as well as a government representative if they so choose.
Contractual agreements allow Carers and permanent patients to feel safe knowing they have a home. It is a callous cruelty to know forest fires are burning and yet people are still homeless. If I may steal some shine, I believe citizens who give some of their land to the homeless can be exempt from property tax for the rest of their life. Homelessness fixed for free. Ask me the story of how Bellevue led me to the idea.
Out-patient therapies include sex and tantra therapy, guided meditation, non-violent communication, conflict resolution, talk therapy, serious game playing and making workshop, music therapy, Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings (these last two would be free of cost), etc.
Another avenue for earning could be a mental health podcast or radio broadcast on a frequency schizophrenics actually like (many schizophrenics dislike wireless signals and things talk to us so what’s the link there? [Anecdotal]) This podcast is the recruitment tool for long-stay visitors who can hear and identify warning signs before it’s too late.
Long-stay visitors convalesce and attend therapies for free. Cases are accepted on a rolling basis before they become acute otherwise they are referred to UWI Hospital where they are reasoned with until they accept medication from a calming isolation room, littered with beanbags for sitting, cushions for resting or beating up or screaming into, the atmosphere of which (music, lighting) can be changed through an intercom interaction and is monitored by camera. The patient is only ever tied up and restrained and injected against their will if they are trying to hurt themselves in the isolation room. That is the only compromise I am willing to make with the old way of doing things. Only if we are trying to die.
People check themselves into the Care Community and can stay for free. After they convalesce they join in on activities: gardening hydroponics, crafting community items that require nothing sharp or blunt, washing calabash and coconut shell dishes after meals, etc.
They can be guests on the community podcast or radio show, sharing their mental health journey. They can record music on their phone, if they want to engage with technology, or just learn guitar if they have shown they don’t throw destructive tantrums. They can write stories and poetry and learn how to make games if they bring a laptop.
The community can hold ‘Positive Vibes’ parties with party music devoid of anti-blackness and self-hate. These parties have no inebriates and ask the question: can you have a good time sober?
In this community, everyone is both patient and carer. Therapy for everyone because black people who want it should get it.
One beautiful thing if we develop proper strains of plants for medicine is you can help grow and learn how to care for your own raw materials.
Imagine you are afraid of the world because of capitalist alienation and division of labour. It’s too much trust to give if your trust has really been broken so everything becomes a hazard and you’re just one little you.
If you can control your medicine even a little bit, it’s worth it. You’re helping to cure, not just abate symptoms.
Long-stay visitors must attend counseling of their choice based on the community therapy schedule, agreed upon weekly. This is the only scheduled part of the day – we have to learn how to be free and sane, it’s easy to stand up, sit down, turn around when Simon Says. What about daily life outside? We need Freedom.
Rules? Don’t smell like pee or poop. Don’t be violent. Don’t destroy anything. Don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Don’t sexually harass anyone. Rules for everyone. You are escorted out if you are a visitor and violate this and you risk exclusion from community benefits and income if you are a community member but you go into counseling first.
So let’s imagine a visitor’s intake: you check yourself in and are brought to the ‘soft room.’ This is a cushiony room with living walls of soft plants that can be easily replaced if someone turns violent and needs to be escorted away. There are beanbag chairs made of Pinatex (a vegan leather made of pine skin) and stuffed with coffee beans for aroma therapy perhaps or some equivalent that keeps well. The room may have a camera and an intercom. The intercom is next to a protected tablet that controls a music player from ecological servers, radio on a frequency us schizos like [speculation], episodes of the in-house podcast and community-made books, poems, songs and short films to view and enjoy on a bolted television, high up that can’t be touched because there are no chairs, just beanbags (or a wheelchair for those with creaky bones.)
Front desk is nearby as is security. A counselor interviews the patient to begin assessing responses and the patient is observed for signs of violence.
There is no reason for violence in this scenario as you are not being forced to do anything. Even in the heights of delusion, patients still exhibit reciprocal manners majority of the time.
Once the patient is deemed non-violent they are paired with a stable long-term resident who can be a peer counselor or a visitor care staffer, students often, completing their studies. Private rooms of two are arranged and you can always put a sock on the door, dorm room style and the other person goes to the common dorm area for those who prefer living family style.
So what if a patient is threatening to become violent? There should be a rage room. I and other patients had to slam bathroom doors to be able to express emotions of anger and frustration all under the fear that more chemicals would be used on us to subdue us or it would lengthen our unwilling stay and keep us there longer.
No violence, no medication needed. We don’t medicate murderers but we do it to the mentally ill because we can’t read minds and we’re scared of serial killers and unabombers.
In my experience, most mental patients are victims. If a few victims become perpetrators, that’s normal.
Mostly vegetables are eaten here in order to eat what is grown. This also helps reset gut bacteria – important in mental health. It also provides compost for growing more crops and bio-gas for cooking.
The community is secular. You as a Carer, do not want to be forced to pray and sing everyday, especially since you earn your own money, and the same will be said of patients. They are paying their way crafting, peer counseling, making therapeutic art… Separation of Church and State, Jamaica, please! There are people who believe they have demons on the wards and a Christian nurse told one such agitated patient her mother doesn’t love her. This patient ended up praying constantly, lost in an episode.
Christians are not moral enough to dictate anything, they should not monopolize a public sector service as the thought leader on ethics and metaphysics.
But continuing visualizing: the patient is given the choice to try out lifestyle, natural medicine (specially cultivated plants processed into medicine) and pharmaceuticals (synthesized interventions). A natural medicine gave me back a period that was stolen by Poly-cystic Ovarian Syndrome. I trust nature-based science. Science, for sure, but caring about and not damaging nature.
How much electricity, water, plastic and oil is used to make pharmaceuticals and injections, and ship them? How much longer can that go on while we avoid 2°C heating. I am not being wishy-washy. This is an emergency and I was fully within my rights to have a mad moment given all I grinned and bore for ten years.
The rest of the details of Care Community life can be speculated upon and researched.
I’ll leave with this. I have spent the past 5-6 years smoking cigarettes heavily, not having enough income for a healthy diet as a result and instead opting to add weed which works as an appetite suppressant and mood stabilizer for me.
I’d snack in the day then have a helluva big dinner then take my pills. I saw my psychiatrist consistently.
I came off my meds eventually because I was traveling and the war in Ukraine was disrupting pharmaceuticals and worrying me about what to do if I could not get medication – what am I like off meds? I also wanted to have a baby. Could I have a natural, happy baby? I wanted to find out.
I used to say I wouldn’t birth a child, I would only adopt, because I did not want to pass on my genes.
Now, the things I have seen this brain do, my shorthand with patients, my me I have built, my talent, my beauty – excuse me, please and thank you: this needs a sequel.
Okay. That’s it for now.
Love,
Aleya Jobson
Held in Bellevue Hospital from June 18, 2024 to August 14, 2024.
Article slightly modified for accuracy.