Committed to the Sane Asylum

Susan Schellenberg, Rosemary Barnes

Description

In Committed to the Sane Asylum: Narratives on Mental Wellness and Healing, artist Susan Schellenberg, a former psychiatric patient, and psychologist Rosemary Barnes relate their own stories, conversations, and reflections concerning the contributions and limitations of conventional mental health care and their collaborative search for alternatives such as art therapy. Patient and doctor each describe personal decisions about the mental health system and the creative life possibilities that emerged when mind, body, and spirit were committed to well-being and healing.

Interwoven patient/doctor narratives explain conventional care, highlight critical steps in healing, and explore varied perspectives through conversations with experts in psychiatry, feminist approaches, art, storytelling, and business. The book also includes reproductions of Susan’s mental health records and dream paintings.

This book will be important for consumers of mental health care wishing to understand the conventional system and develop the best quality of life. Rich personal detail, critical perspective, clinical records, and art reproductions make the book engaging for a general audience and stimulating as a teaching resource in nursing, social work, psychology, psychiatry, and art therapy.

Sujets

• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 07 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554587803
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Committed to the Sane Asylum
Committed to the Sane Asylum
Narratives on Mental Wellness and Healing
Susan Schellenberg Rosemary Barnes
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Schellenberg, Susan, 1934- Committed to the sane asylum: narratives on mental wellness and healing/ Susan Schellenberg and Rosemary Barnes.
Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-55458-034-7
1. Schellenberg, Susan, 1934- -Mental health. 2. Barnes, Rosemary Ann. 3. Mental illness-Treatment. 4. Art therapy. 5. Narrative therapy. 6. Artists-Canada-Biography. 7. Mentally ill-Canada-Biography. 8. Psychologists-Canada-Biography. I. Barnes, Rosemary Ann II. Title.
RC339.5.S33 2009 616.80092 C2008-901649-1
Portions of the Introduction and some of Susan Schellenberg s artworks were published previously in The Pleasures of Healing, the Possibilities for Mental Health Care, by R.A. Barnes and S. Schellenberg, Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme 24: 194-99.
The lines by Raymond Carver at the end of chapter 8 are used by permission of Grove/Atlantic Inc. Copyright 1989 by the Estate of Raymond Carver.
Cover design by Chris Hoy and David Schellenberg. Interior design by Pam Woodland.
2009 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca
This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled). The paper used in the colour section is approved by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
There is a crack in everything. That s how the light gets in.

From Anthem, The Future (1992), written and sung by Leonard Cohen, produced by Leonard Cohen and Rebecca DeMornay
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Normal Beginnings
2 Protests
3 Towards Healing
4 Strengthening through Structure, Healing through Art
5 Conversations on Mental Health Care
6 Conversations on Story, Art, and Healing
7 War and Peace
8 An Eye to Delight
Appendix I: Susan Schellenberg s Art and Text
Appendix II: Clinical Records and Glossary
colour plates
Acknowledgements
W E THANK THE MANY PEOPLE who have encouraged and advised us. The medical record librarians at the former Queen Street Mental Health Centre and Kingston Psychiatric Hospital kindly assisted in locating the clinical records of Susan and her uncle, Leo Marrin Regan. David Guiffrida, Legal Counsel to the Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office, provided us with information about legal considerations in the use of clinical records. Dr. Mary Seeman, Dr. Brenda Toner, Dr. Margaret Malone, Paul Hogan, Helen Porter, Gail Regan, and Dr. Cheryl Rowe all generously donated their time not only for conversations but also to review background materials and to read and correct transcriptions of the conversations. Dr. Seeman has encouraged our work in important ways well beyond conversation with us. Gail Regan has been generously supportive of our creative efforts over many years. Helen Porter died in September 2007 as we were in the final stages of preparing this book; her life and stories were an enormous inspiration and we deeply miss her. Psychologists Dr. Patricia DeFeudis and Dr. Rickey Miller contributed much insight into hospital functioning. Heather Jacko and Gayla Aitkens completed initial transcriptions of our tape-recorded conversations. Psychiatrist Dr. Cheryl Rowe, psychologist Dr. Sarah Maddocks, Nancy Webb, and Maureen Edgar read and commented on earlier versions of the manuscript and provided much appreciated encouragement; Dr. Rowe repeatedly answered questions and shared her considerable knowledge about the concerns and psychiatric care of people with serious mental illness. Nancy Webb assisted greatly on a final edit of this text, particulary with names and references.
Jacqueline Larson provided gentle encouragement and incisive critique during the final stages of manuscript revision and steered us to Wilfrid Laurier University Press, where the guidance and enthusiasm of editorial, production, and marketing staff have sustained us to complete the final work associated with publication. Jacquelyn Waller-Vintar provided professional editing services for an earlier version of the entire manuscript. Family, friends, and the gang at Fraser Lake supported us in many ways including providing feedback on various title and book cover suggestions. James Madden read sections of the manuscript and pointed out the need for a glossary. Chris Hoy and David Schellenberg provided us with helpful technical support as well as a lovely cover design. Various individuals at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health ( CAMH ) supported us-we would like to give particular thanks to Jean Simpson, former Chief Operating Officer at CAMH and Dr. Paul Garfinkel, former Chair, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, and President and Chief Executive Officer of CAMH .
Susan Macphail, Louise Fagan, Elaine Pollett, and Sheila Simpson, who formed the Shedding Skins Committee of the London Women s Mental Health and Addiction Action and Research Coalition (WMHAARC), invited us to present a talk and slide presentation to a large London, Ontario, audience in April 2000. The standing ovation we received at the end of the evening encouraged us to believe that this book could offer hope to many people.
Introduction
Susan
There will be a place for Susan after the war, Mrs. Regan, was the doctor s response when my mother asked if something could be done about my artistic nature. It was 1939. I was five years old and the Second World War had just begun. Armed with my father s promise that a day would come when pictures of war would no longer be on the front pages of newspapers, I settled into dreaming as I waited for war to end.
Close to VE day, I dreamed a marriage between two fish. The fish, dressed in traditional human wedding attire, sailed off to their honeymoon in a seahorse-drawn carriage. My grade five teacher and my mother, both disturbed by the excellence of my fish composition, jointly concluded that despite my effort, a grade of 60 rather than 100 percent would better serve the taming of my imagination and good of my soul.
There was no let-up in my Irish Catholic grooming. I was taught to pre-weigh each pleasure for its potential sinfulness, to confess my sins on Saturday, and to artfully express loveliness with practised white-gloved receiving-line entrances. While the seeds of the Vietnam war were being sown and the Korean and Cold wars were raging, I trained as a nurse, travelled the obligatory three months in Europe, then broke with the Regan tradition of marrying Irish by falling in love with a first-generation German Canadian. While my husband worked at excelling in business, I gave birth to the first four of our five children in four years, helped nurse a dying father and a mother who suffered a stroke shortly after his death, and gave my all to being a glamorous corporate wife. Though exhausted, I blossomed.
Then, in 1969, as an estimated 1 million Americans across the US participated in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, protest rallies, and peace vigils, I too began to protest, but my demonstrations took the form of a psychosis.
I was treated solely with prescribed antipsychotic drugs during my three-week stay in Toronto s Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital and for the ten years that followed. My former husband and I understood psychiatrists had explained that my illness was schizophrenia. My willingness to take the drugs was influenced by a nursing background that taught how schizophrenia was a chronic, irreversible, degenerative illness controlled solely by drugs; I was also compelled by my four small children s need of a well mother. I was additionally persuaded that drugs were a necessity by graphic and disturbing extremes in schizophrenic behaviours that I witnessed during my nursing career as well as during my stay at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. The lack of any other explanation or meaning about my diagnosis given to me by my caregivers, and my willingness to place sole authority for my health in doctors hands increased the effect of these motivating factors and contributed to my certainty that I suffered from a chronic illness with no hope for recovery.
Ten years later, while Quebec was considering a split from the rest of Canada, I too threatened to split apart. My suicidal urges triggered by antipsychotic drug side effects began to manifest and accelerate. On one of the darkest days in that period, the smallest of acts (my first ever in my own best interests), led me to find a psychiatrist willing to supervise my withdrawal from the drugs. Soon after my decision to withdraw from drugs, I made deep commitments to heal my mind from the causes of my psychosis, to heal my body from the drug side effects, and to paint a record of my dreams as my mind and body healed.
Reagan in the White House