I highlighted Rufus’s documentary The Doctor Who Hears Voices on this blog before. It’s on youtube here. Rufus May had a radical experience with an altered state of consciousness (psychosis) which was labeled schizophrenia at the time. He’s completely recovered and is now a clinical psychologist who works for the National Health Service in England.
Rufus tells his story to Will Hall on Madness Radio here. Towards the end of the interview he speaks about the exciting ways more enlightened mental health professionals and peers are working with people who hear voices.
So many of us who get locked into a lifetime of drugs start like Rufus, but are not given the opportunity to heal naturally and come through our psyche’s crisis.
I highly recommend your surfing through the archives at Madness Radio. Will Hall has interviewed some great people. I’ve posted several of these interviews in the past, but there are many more.
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Gianna,
Is there a more frightening word in the English language than “schizophrenia”?…..
I sometimes wonder how many people are impeded toward full recovery from the label alone….It’s frightening….It conjures up such horrible images…..
Talk about a triumph – over a label, man-made limits, and an”illness” that is so-often shown in such a negative and frightening way….
Being told you will never recover….
People doing what they are told they will never do – the human spirit at its best!
Duane
He’s a good old soul is Rufus!
The Murdoch press tried to ruin him after he made that film. They claimed he was a menace, dangerous, a crazy who “laughs like a mad man”.
Actually he was having fun. Rufus and friends were doing a “bed push”, wheeling a giant hypodermic needle around.
They were highlighting the grotesque human rights abuses that go on in secret, behind the locked doors of Britain’s psychiatric institutions.
While on their bed push, Rufus, his friends and their giant needle, stopped outside a mental hospital. Through a megaphone, Rufus ordered the shrinks to come out with their hands up!
That’s called making a point and having fun at the same time!
Don’t suppose Murdoch and his crew of gutter press hacks would ever grasp that though.
Is that the same video in which Rufus locks horns with an ego-maniacal shrink from the Homerton Hospital in London?
If so, the shrink, Dr Trever Turner, who is touted as “one of the country’s leading psychiatrists”, claimed that Rufus and his gentle methods of dealing with mental distress, posed a grave danger to patients..
Pot kettle black…
I learned of a personal tragedy right on Dr Turner’s doorstep.. He should remember it himself, when scoffing at others..
A friend was committed to the Homerton, Turner’s place of work. The Homerton is one of London’s most depressing psychiatric hell holes.
Against his wishes, and often while under violent physical restraint, my friend was drugged senseless with neuroleptics by Turner’s colleagues. He was powerless and suffered terribly from drug side effects, particularly severe restlessness (akathisia).
On release, he continued to be drugged against his wishes. The drug side effects were simply too great and he decided he couldn’t stand it any longer, and jumped off the balcony of his high rise flat in Shoreditch. He left behind a doting girlfriend and a beautiful one year old daughter.
I’ve got a photo taken a year before that tragedy happened.
We are all sitting in a beer garden, grinning like Cheshire cats. My friend, his g/friend, and their sweet little child, all smiling for the camera..
Less than a year later and psychiatry had ruined not just one life, but the lives of an entire family.
Now there is the proof that your lot are the true menace, Dr Turner.
Stories like this make me weep. It’s so inspiring but it’s also so tragic that so few people make it to the other side of well being. Thanks for sharing this with us.