This
song is from my album "Songs from the Locked Ward," written and
recorded in the summer of 2009. I wrote it as a testament to the
horrors people suffer at the hands of psychiatry---the lack of empathy,
...
New Beginnings by Tim Harris
build strength to work magic change the picture to brilliant from tragic only limits are those you state it's your time feel it's fate
a warrior of peace brilliant light to release draw from its wealth the wingspan the stealth
that hard road was a gift every step had its purpose tomorrow's load a one hand lift
it was what it was free from the maze this is now that was then close eyes to gaze every soul a friend
A Cry in the dark
Washing willows on an empty bay
mothers frayed
internal dexterity
candle blackout
eternal fragmentary
Pardon
listeners never hear good of themselves
come again
a thing of beauty is
a joy forever
Disturbances;
higher mental functions
such that no amount of whistling
in the dark
will
ever
stop us causing ructions
Lydia Walsh - Yildirim
IN THE LOOKING GLASS
Rags and bags.
You look away with your third eye.
Bags and rags.
You look at the blue sky.
Third eye raised,
looking away from the ass in the glass,
away from the "depraved crazed",
away from your behind in the mirror farting gas.
You are unaware that they are conscious.
"No self awareness in their third eye,"
is the consensus,
of people marching by,
"the lesser than us."
You've reduced them to...
- a "mentally ill" biological substrate,
- the lesser than you,
- the unworthy of inalienable rights fate.
- You deny that their hunger pained feelings of starvation is true.
To you, the one in the mirror's life doesn't rate!
By Harry Bentivegna Lichtenstein
August 1, 2009
ELECTROCONVULSIVE SHOCK THERAPY? (ECT)
THERAPY?
ECT is no more therapeutic
than,
bashing skulls more,
or less forcefully
(gentler?),
irrespective of gender,
with a sledge hammer,
Sledge Hammer Therapy?,
SHT,
from here on pronounced,“shhh… t”,
would be therapy.
Let’s try to imagine the
victim’s experience:
Nausea, discombobulated,
L O S TM
EMORIES,
Painful static electricity like feelings causes
enveloping darkness.
The victims are called,
“patients”.
Serious injury and torture
are called, “therapy”.
Mental dementia and brain
damage are called, “side effects”.
Torturers are called,
“doctors”.
The electrical current goes
on as bodies do shivering dances to it.
And the current goes on.
Is torture ethical?
Is it a civil rights
violation?
Can scientific research be
used to –
justify and reclassify torture as being
therapy?
Should ECT and SHT be legal?
Are new laws necessary?
The answers depend on the
time, place,
and legal system we are living under.
ECT is like the emperor who wore no clothes!
Swindlers called themselves,
“scientists”.
They dressed it in the big
lie of it’s therapeutic value.
“Only the dim witted can’t
see it’s clothing,” said the swindlers.
But, ECT is as stark naked as
the emperor was!
Whatever it takes,
enforcing or changing laws;
stop the uncivilized use of
forced ECT and SHT,
whether it is described as, “harsh”
or “gentler”.
Flush the toilet full of ECT
and SHT.
April 4, 2009
Completely revised and added
to the draft of a poem that I wrote May 28, 2001
They have stripped you of your dignity They have tried to crush your spirit They have tried to erase you, invade you And claim you as their own experiment They have tried to stunt your development With mind-numbing, brain dis-abling drugs In the guise of break-through treatment They deny you your basic right to freedom You are their lucrative label, their last bastion They clip your wings and dreams with bad medicine That changes your personality and denies you your pain Your humanity, your gifts, your sensitivity They have treated you like a beast, beneath them You are so brave to resist, persist and insist That you do not have a chemical imbalance You have fought them all the way with your true story Battle lines are drawn and their weapon is chemical You take the blows and punch them back their label Before the syringe is filled and the needle aimed It takes three of them to hold you down, it’s assault Non-compliant, treatment-resistant, insistent In the face of over-whelming cruel power They crucify you every time you Remind them of their pseudo-science
Song ( Mary Maddock)
Slaves
We are not We are not We are not your slaves anymore
Find another job Find another job Find another job to earn your bob
We will find our liberty We will not live in misery
We are not We are not We are not your slaves anymore
No more brain damage No more brain damage No more brain damage anymore
No more electroshock No more electroshock
No more electroshock anymore
The Butterfly of Life
Regina O' Flynn
No one laughs at me
But yet I am a likeable laugh
Everyone gets something
And I got mine
You sail on the crust and cuff of a wave
Now I’m sad
Cos I think my sub conscience
Works in a way that it
Takes a while to understand and feel
Registers the news in my brain
Death affects me so much
And the loss of a life
I’m not the same
I’m two poles in the one body
It’s passed midnight
And the world is asleep
No one to talk to
Only the thoughts in my head
Over and over and over again
I split myself in half and please
Wish I had a midnight friend----Oh God!
As I put this pen to paper
It saddens even more
The racing thoughts in my head
Why me, why me, why me?
Crying will not ease
The road that is ahead
It’s either up or down, which ever
Happens – that is it.
The pain of my heart
Almost stops my breathing.
Yet I would never change
What I am.
The power of one
The moments of life
All the parts of living
Experienced to extremes.
But the sadness is within
Fragile girl – daddiless – without blame
Thank you Jesus
One day I will return to you
Love always
The butterfly of life
Each minute seems like an hour
Waiting for the midnight time to pass
No one to talk to
Only the ticking of the clock
The eyes are closing
But yet can’t sleep
Insomnia, insomnia.
Watching T.V.
How pleasant
Tick, tick, tick…….
Getting sadder from the
Cycle of no sleep and
Wishing time to pass.
Is medication the answer?
The side effects, pain
Is it normal to feel?
To feel sad, to feel afraid
Panic – towards the future
Cannot face the public
Oh – to take a step out of life
And enjoy the dance
And rest in the spirit.
Mouth gets drier
From pills we took – stronger side effects/painful
But yet the angel of sleep
Will not visit.
How pleasant to spend the night
Only with the stars watching
Heavier and heavier become the lids
But no shut eye
Mouth becomes like sandpaper.
Sadder and sadder is the feeling inside
Want to talk to someone
But only Man on the Moon will listen
Jack Frost is gone on a sabbatical
And even Mr. Sunshine will not be here till day.
Reflection/ reflection/reflection
The butterfly of life.
Whipping Good Memories and Dead Horses
by Dean Blehert
Despair, when it is, is bottomless, omnivorous, swallowing whatever you throw at it. As your goals vanish into its maw, you try to kill despair, hurling at it your best memories, your triumphs, your deepest truths, and these too are instantly coated with sticky black drool.
Memories will only stand for so much, and then they mutiny: "Don't you remember...?" "NO! I never loved you, it was never good with you!" An old truth is a slippery anchor in a maelstrom, one more weight to drag us under. "But it was good! It was wonderful, remember? Please remember!" So one tells oneself (or so we tell each other) like a teamster in a blizzard who doesn't realize the horse he's whipping has frozen to death.
Despair owns the walls of the room, each piece of furniture, your body, the bed, the window, whatever you can see through the window, the texture of whatever you touch -- and any wisp of memory you drag into the room where you are stuck, staring at or away from despair.
Despair is beaten by not believing what one seems to know (that this night or week or month or year is forever), by knowing that it eats anything you bring near it, by not feeding it.
See that delicate ship hoisting all its bright-colored sails into the dark fury of a storm? See it plow under, all sails flying?
No, best to batten down, lie low until one can move, can see or imagine a way to move, lifting one foot, then the other and moving in a direction one insists on calling (against all of the nightmare's frantic denials) forward; one finds something to do that one can do -- a little thing, tie a shoe, take a walk, clean a room, get out of bed, scratch an itch, listen to the Blues...
not some radical puffed-up parody of total solution urged by despair itself, charged with melodramatic electricity. Find one thing that is (if we pretend there can ever again be one thing better than another) better to do than nothing at all, and do it,
and gradually -- as chaos resolves into up and down, what is and what is not -- one can do more, begins to feel that the circles in which one has been moving have, themselves, been moving, like a child's traveling ovals --
one has been getting somewhere, one begins to know some things one never knew before, and there are calmer spaces, breaks in blackness, hints of a sky that is not sea, a long arc of horizon, a direction, a future and, therefore, a past, the tingle (uncoaxed) of a few good memories, still dazed, but alive after all, a smell of salty tangled life that could be hope.
Hindsight Horizon
by
Lydia Walsh-Yildirim
They called her mellow
Yellow drapers caught the twilight sun
Moonlit ravens making one
Whole fractions
Seldom
Sums it up
The drapers sparkle in delight
Willows lifted, reveal the shadow of a life
Once hiding in corners; bated breath
Now one
May call it a living...
Walking in wardrobes
These globetrotters
Under care of rotters
Knotted, Mellow’s got the trots now
He’s made it through
The bouts of hollow vacancies
+ bulkmade stew
Rubbernecking round thepew
Muffled
Voices – let them through
Unshaken silence on fields of barley,
Oats and rye
Demons straitingwe’re not standing
S***!
The penny drops mind
Freedom fighters united
Ain’t abiding lies nor log rolls
Stretchers
Yellow drapers snatch
The twilight Son
C'est La Unvie
by
James M. Nordlund
A million monarchs lie dead, though,
No less sociological programming of
Upper-middle to rich classes with
Decadence, affluence, inclusion, is.
No less societal determination of
Middle to lower, being excluded by
Division and conquering, privation.
Yet, they, on wing no more, still fly
In our spirit's eye, heal humanities'
Heart. While their silent cry echoes
The 33,000 species extinct each year,
A rate not seen since the last ice age
Ensued; does it move you?
Does your curiosity ask why?
Will you, on this 33rd Earth Day, allow
A tear for all life's fallen? Consider
The losses economic apartheid incurs,
Mirrored by the divide human-centricity
Has levied? Our underlying duplicitous
Disregard for life, greed and oil fueled,
Won't abate for our existence, will you?
( For the beautiful butterflies, et tu, mon amis, written one and a half years before the 33rd. )
Broken Hearts
Broken hearts have endless pains
Recorded in the head
The Psychiatric warriors
Plunder the living dead.
The blind are lost, but lead the blind
With salaries immense
They endlessly pontificate
And have no common sense.
Ignoring what the mind can do
With the pain of a broken heart
Lost amid the psyche
They know not where to start.
Baggage labels made by Freud
Are randomly selected
Electric shocks administered
And powerful drugs injected.
Encased in their sarcophagae
The "Citizens Ashamed"
Instead of being cared for
Are very often blamed!
Their mutilated minds have made them
Loners- set apart
No one quite remembers -
They came with a broken heart.
Chris Youngman
Twice Daily
( Poem by Lydia, which she read at the MindFreedom Ireland candle light vigil in honor of Emsin Green R.I.P.)
Poetry/Song
