A Modern Day Slave

A Modern Day Slave

by Edward Walter

A mature man cannot have too much remorse without seeing his life shortened in a manner that no longer enables him to observe his kind. A human being rests sociable, the sound of exchanges between others remains a necessity in spite of the pain that any implication engenders. Suffering, chains, and ‘protocols’ are experienced as a violent slap of the soul, bruising the spirit, an injury of the awakened conscience. The apartheid of medical ‘deontology’ tries to formalise segregation in order that the white cladded or ‘carers’ are not too close, concerned, or contradicted. There are those who, with a shade of regret, allow you to perceive their freedom, even if this is confined but relatively affranchised, in order to relieve their consciences, to find tranquility, indeed a form of self appeasement. Alikened to the motifs on a leather whip that nevertheless exists to lash and injure. The laughing of some of the white cladded carers happen only between themselves. Laughing that reaches your ears and reminds you of the mocking crowing of ravens that reminds you of your transience, mortality, and age.

To hear the full throated hilarity of these white cladded carers in the rest room inflicts on you the reality of your situation : subordination and servitude. Their feelings, if indeed they have any, are so well guarded for themselves, they are as if invisible, palpably empty. And you, you play the part of an obliging victim with a long apprenticeship. You provoke the sneering smile of one and the smiling remarks of another in a milieu as artificial as the relations they maintain with those of us in servitude. Certain ‘carers‘ when asked how they are reply ‘oh l’m always well’. You are certain that this is a downright lie, notwithstanding the mask of her trade allows us to see her immaculate teeth, like a steel cutting guillotine press, she doesn’t ponder anymore, it’s automatic like the movements of a robot. That’s what she’s paid for. And the inevitable, ‘how are you?’ from the slaves and ‘carers’ alike as if we needed to console ourselves constantly that it’s okay, when we know pertinently that nothing is okay.  If you speak of sadness they speak of depression.  If you speak of happiness they speak of exaltation or mania. These are the chains that hurt us so when we try to get up and walk. The fetters that remove the skin from our ankles, the handcuffs that give us open sores on our wrists. You hear a reproach : ‘and if you knew how to cry, what would you cry about?’ Indeed, we no longer cry, but not because we don’t want to. This is the bio medical approach. Everything must be ‘clean’, we don’t engage in human trafficking with dirty hands… Profit is vital for those in the know. On their level the ‘carers’ (always clean) see themselves allotted cars, sometimes houses; their collaboration is paid for by material resources, the bribes of a mafia.

Of course as a ‘carer’, there is the unthwarted safeness of an inclassifiable lassitude, indefinable. This pain comes from the intrinsic uselessness of seeing their ‘care’ fail incessantly. When in fact they exercise social control in places where the deprivation of liberty for all is practised, but we call them hospitals not prisons where there are bedrooms not cells, even though some ‘bedrooms’ are locked,  and where all access to outdoors is condemned. For some ‘carers’ there is the boredom of being at the service amongst people totally uninteresting. If interest there is, then it is purely ‘professional’. Each day brings its batch of pain but we don’t touch any longer. The dismay of thoughts that they (the ‘carers’) can dare is to say that they have no power, that they are not responsible; they leave the decision making to the elites in order to give themselves, once again, a clear conscience.  The possibility that you could have a free and enlightened relationship with one of these white cladded carers is a bird that has left the sky a long, long time ago. When you smoke, it reminds you of your lack of cognition, cigarette after cigarette.

You remember the first time they brought you in in an ambulance, in your native country. You saw the immense victorian building, solid, built of brick. You asked yourself what are they going to do to you in such an enormous structure. The reply becomes rapidly clear:  they inject you with chemicals,  pulling your trousers down whilst four white-coated men constrain you on the floor of the ward.  Rape is not estranged to this scene. The shame, the humiliation, the hate that this event provokes in you causes tears in your eyes. The complicity of your family is an abominable treason and very painful. In writing these words, your memory is tainted with anger, sadness, and humiliation. Your work is interrupted often because the words flowing from your pen are like arrows in your flesh – as deadly and remorseful.

While it’s true that your cognitive functions have diminished and that your concentration has suffered the most, that you have been damaged by the chemical torture, your resolution to tell your story has never flinched. The need to tell of the horrors that go on in ‘developed ‘ countries all over the world is stronger now than ever, harder than concret, more ardent than a prayer. Some, like M., are so affected by their mistreatment that their thoughts have become dispersed; they are unable to understand from where their problems originated. You think at the moment of the present times.

The scenery is not exceptional for such places. It’s like a small village with pavillions dotted around a small park. The ‘carers’ scuttle to and fro under the winter sun, burnt by the icy wind. The woman with the keys in her hand opens the door of the unit, her artificial smile is ignored by your presence. The interior of the concret Bouygue box is lite to enable the hunt of every concevable bacteria in every corner of the passages, an agressive light, blinding. You walk into one of two adjacent passages where to the left and to the right are doors of what are euphemistically called bedrooms. In the cells are people that are for the most part exhausted, immobile, and silent. Two strips of reinforced plexiglass are in laid into the doors that enable the ‘carers’ to look intrusively into each cell. Like you, they have recent souvenirs of needles, like daggers, that have raped and bled them. In the harsh light of the sterile corridors, there are round mirrors fixed at regular intervals to the ceiling that permit the vision around corners in case of a hidden threat. In one of the corridors are found two cells with the sobriquet of ‘pacifying bedrooms’ where there is a bed fixed with bolts in the centre of the room with bars on the window and a recess where is found a toilet and a shower that is operated by an infra red sensor that cannot be regulated.  And that’s it. The pacifying of Julian is now eternal. The memory of him remains, there where he took a fist full of benzodiazepines before sleeping forever, a boy of nineteen years of age.  His life, like so many here, is without any hope of recovery. They must be obliging, convincing their jailers of their satisfaction with the hospital and the place they have in it. To do this they must confirm the role of the ’professionals‘ that impose the conditions of the deal.

The wind whistles through the scots pine outside of the room where you find yourself, again, alone. The sun is not high in the heavens despite it being mid day, its warmth is quickly chased away by the breath of Aeolus. The furtive cries await you as you pass the autist’s pavilion. It’s rare that you see them in the park. The mortality rate is extremely high here ;  people die young here with a frequency that makes you worried for your own longevity. The media, transformed into public communications agencies, publish not the merest hint, a situation of shameful collaboration and dishonesty. They are richly paid off in order to render the lives of those who are not ‘ill’ as easy as possible. You think of all the people here enchained, and you know exactly why.

Without noticing the night has fallen, the agitation in the unit (what a strange word to employ for a prison) returns with your arrival from a period of peace in the therapeutic (?) apartment that has been allotted to you, which is, in fact, just another form of seclusion. The conversations turn from delirious to intimate in the wink of an eye, but you prefer this to the illegitimate discourse and artificial rhetoric of their elite who haunt the unit but desert it for the week-ends. From them you expect nothing apart from psuedo scientific slang that promotes and seeks to reinforce their administrative clout as officers of the state.

Your statute is the most subaltern that exists in this underworld. You hear the cries of an ‘agitated’ woman and the blowing of the mechanical ventilation in your cell. Thank God that Ian Curtis never experienced this. You would have wanted to protect him as with Camille— with tenderness and understanding. They would never have found that here.

Your translation of John Read progresses slowly  because there aren’t enough hours in the day. He has identified different factors which can provoke ‘psychosis’ (l prefer emotional distress or suffering), in adolescence. One or a mix of these factors have been proven to increase the probability of psychosis in later life. Poverty,  sexual violence or physical, negligence or the fact of losing one’s mother before the age of 10 years old. What a disgusting opportunity for those to profit from and take an authoritarian acsendency over those who suffer.

When the practitioners enter the unit the ‘carers’, or the paid off, react with precaution. The words addressed to these administrators are carefully chosen, sorted and instructed. They provoke apprehension and oblige the ‘lunatics’ to keep their distance. This distance is painful and frightening because these officers go about their interests, which are directly those of the laboratories. ‘Lunatics‘ and ‘carers’ alike know that the time of these chiefs is limited and they must not accost them for nothing. It is they who decide whether or not you have accepted your enslavement or alienation so that you can find a near normal (more like a parody of) life. It is they who decide whether or not you are satisfied with the life they decide for you. They are the slave drivers of modern times.

These slave masters know the value of their merchandise ; they know how much a ‘lunatic’ is worth  (nothing by himself), but the treatments are very profitable and destroy the lives of so many. A long term hospitalisation is worth its weight in gold : several million pounds or euros. This with the treatment for life – and the lives of these psychiatrists is rendered extremely comfortable.

And the incessant search for news. A grandfather who wishes to see his grandchild for the first time. Or simply a father who wants so much to see once more his beloved daughter. These psychiatrists or officers are not concerned with any distance between parents and children, husbands and wives, grandparents and grandchildren. It is a place without hope in this hospital, and in how many countless other hospitals. A grandfather obtained the permission to leave for the week-end if one of his three children agree to come and collect him. He is still without news. And Françoise, the girlfriend of Serge, dead and buried without her name .

You think about your daughter, the sun is shining on your birthday, she is as incandescent with warmth. You would dearly like to see your first born, left since his studies in law to manage the doubtful fortunes of the very rich. Your thoughts are for them ; you have always considered thoughts to be a form of prayer, for your children you wish peace – something that you attain for yourself only with great difficulty.  That is perhaps what love is, infinite goodwill without which your life would be reduced to ashes.

Here is no love or goodwill, just ‘the state ’ which we could translate as ‘the heap’. When the state decides for lives, it’s usually a catastophy and totalitarian in the sense the most iniquitous. Never can one confuse the two expressions or preoccupations ; they are opposites.  In ascertaining the enslaved, the proprietors often washed and perfumed their slaves, and they dressed them richly to please. Here we are thrown in an ‘ appeasement cell’ in a light blue ‘pyjama’ that looks horrific without an explanation and in a violent and abrupt manner. The recluses fall like flies here and our only aim is to stay alive for the day. Your grandfather would have been horrified to know of the conditions in which you are held. He survived the first world war. The psychiatric institution is just a form of war : the third world war – only with more victims.

You have learnt to pretend that you are satisfied because if you do not and you show your extreme unease at the conditions of your imprisonment, treated as a subject of the laboratories, your life would be even more unbearable and you would be submerged with ever increasing doses of harmful sedatives to the point that you would become like some of the long-term patients here, a dribbling vegetable. So when an administrator asks you how you are, you have the obligation to say ‘well’, or words to that effect. This is involontary obedience, or more clearly slavery. All dissatisfaction is banned because the diagnostic would only be more serious if you were honest. But the chemicals forced upon you and prescribed by the administrators are major tranquillisers and give you, in the end, cerebral attacks and other more intimate complications. You are 56 years old and you fearing to die in their trap. Each day you make the effort to seem unconscious of the stake of the lives of all found between these walls.

After the distribution of the chemicals the meal is served by the ‘carers’. At the beginning of each meal one of the ‘carers’ invariably barks ‘have a good meal!’ This is done with such unerring regularity that the unease of the interned is palpable.  It is really twisted. Some reply; you remain silent. You think that this ‘carer’ is as twisted as one of the interned who insists on having the last word on everything, no matter what the subject. One woman is what they call ‘agitated’. A day later she is so sedated that she cannot feed herself.

The ‘carer’ who makes a visible effort to smile, her white teeth ready to bite, has asked your daughter not to tell you that she knows her to you ; she is really very attached to her statute of torturer. And then there is the ‘carer’ who doesn’t speak; she literally barks when she talks. Her  ungracious physical appearence is reflected perfectly by her rather untoward personality.

But you have always the pleasure of your spirits in the contemplation of the brightness of the light of the stars that appear to guide you, to take you with them. They are identical to those which led your ancestors.  They were their compass, finding the way in forest or plateau during their lives. Sometimes you feel quite sane despite the circus deployed to tell you you’re mad. You wish to found a distended family with C, her children and yours. This keeps you alert and awake, conscious. This will be if you don’t die beforehand from their crimes which aren’t supposed to be illegal and kill you.

The state of S. varies between placitude and agitation according to the medication they give her, which changes each week and has for the last two years. She changes from kindness to agressivity in the blink of an eye. Like you, she wants so badly to leave and not die in this god forsaken place. What is most difficult to live with is the fact that the diagnostic is so much more traumatic than the symptoms. The stigma of such a diagnostic is crushing. There are three criteria to describe a schizophrenic :  dangerous, unpredictably dangerous, and irresponsible. There is nothing worse than to be confronted with the reaction of people to this diagnostic. It is far more traumatic than the symptoms.

You ponder of all the people who have passed here, with outstretched hands, for most of them they have seen themselves given a ‘diagnostic‘. Your thoughts turn to Sandrine or Caroline and you are pleased to have known them. C cares for you; she trusts you, she is sweet. You’ll never forget her; her hand will rest in yours for a long time, a real comfort. Would it be possible that someone treats your dossier with the same care?  Or will you be forgotten as a ‘psychotic‘ or ‘schizophrenic’ for the rest of your life? Your very soul is opposed to this abuse, slavery and torture. When spirits rise, human kind renunciate. Sometimes this takes time ; the repeal and reformation is what counts. The movement is rising through the murky waters and will attain the crest of the wave.

Like slavery took such a time to be ‘officially’ forbidden, the psychiatric hospitals will be with us for a little time yet. The masters, the doctors or administrators, are to be declined and no longer feared. They no longer give beatings with their hands but with the far more treacherous chemicals that allow them to keep a good conscience and distribute what are beatings nevertheless. These blows caused by these chemicals can come without warning and your consciousness is diminished by the poisons action on your frontal lobes. The first psychiatrists to use these substances called them chemical lobotomisers. The first of these poisons was called Largactyl in 1955. You receive blows such as these regularly: every 14 days you are forced to take an injection of Haldol (250mg) and 14 days later, Bbilify (400mg). The fact that these are given by force in the butt only increases the sentiment that you’re being repeatedley and systematically raped. As if this was not bad enough, you are forced to swallow two tablets of Treleptal (600mg) each day. You are made to understand that if you do not, you will be injected with 6  ampoules of Loxapac, an even more seriously toxic neuroleptic. So your reaction is entirely involuntary obedience. Stamina is the key to live such a situation. God knows that the patients here have stamina even though many die. In a few days time this grotesqueness will happen again.

The abominable ritual of humiliation and enslavement with a hypodermic needle in the butt takes place so that the masters can have peace in their corrupt consciousness. They have no suspicion of the terrible toll the deep sedation has on you. This mutilation is called ‘health care’. They justify themselves in forcing it upon you by the delirium in their minds and call it ‘professional’.

The way that these major sedatives are adminstered is quickly recognised by the manner in which you walk, the head bowed from slavery chemically-imposed. Your treatment by the artificial courtesy of these ‘carers’ is as if you receive salt in the deep wounds that you are given in your brain. You try to reassure, encourage, and comfort those around you such as Julien, Christophe or Françoise, and all those that you meet.

Their iatrogenic deaths have been planned, foreseen, waited on by these criminals.

The lucky ones are exhibited like beasts in a cage; their mutilated brains serve to show the efficacious injury of these lobotomisants. You seek always the light of dawn in your sleep, at all costs to survive this torture. People here wait for nothing;  they ask themselves what is the point of their lives, at the same time resigned and tired.

The false redhead, after her debauchery from the evening before, comes back invariably to the scene of her crimes where she ‘cares’ for the ‘ill’ with the suitably soft voice of an assassin. You can’t help wondering how a voice can be at the same time so soft and so violently malevolent. Yes, it’s hers. Her authoratative airs are as visible as her artificial sentiments. You stay and are forced to be a lunatic. You are, to her, a recluse, on the back of whom she makes a small salary. If we complain it is to have more money or more ‘means’.  These ‘means ’ are destined to denigrate you better whilst smiling at you all the more.

You remember your mother again and, always, she accompanies you during your reclusion. You recall that she dressed you and you remember the warmth of her hands and her presence. This is a precious souvenir before she was dragged off by the ‘mental health’ executioners when you were only six years old, a traumatism engraved forever in your psyche.  After that, you saw her very little. You would like so much not to be denigrated permanently , looked upon by the artificial psychiatric rhetoric as ‘imprevisibly dangerous’. The hoards of ‘carers’ unclothe you, leaving you frightened and shameful.

The sky is cloud-covered on this day towards the end of winter. The sun is is luminous. You realise that life is good despite the evil of ‘experts’ and the pseudo science of psychiatry. The aim is to remain alive so as to tell your story with its multiple ‘secondary’ side effects. Whatever happens : they can’t steal this moment, however brief, of grace, even if they kill you. You have had this instant under the sky, the sun and at night, the stars and the moon. They can’t take away from you your heart of tenderness and care for your fellow man, never!

You have heard of countries of the ‘third‘ world where the long-term outcomes for what some call ‘schizophrenia‘ are much better than in the occident. Nigeria, Colombia, and India. Your dreams of living in peace in one of these countries, where one can recover and heal from a meaningless  ‘diagnostic’. The World Health Organization published a study that affirms this reality. Is it possible to live without being repeatedley raped with neurotoxins? What luck these peoples have to not be seen as irremediabley ill!

You offer the names of your three children to the stars so they will be protected. You offer their names to the memory of your dear defunct brother taken by cancer nearly two years ago; you know he will care for them. He now belongs to your ancestors, perhaps more benevolent now than during his short 60 year life. You tame the mystery, irredeemably of life and death, you believe that the ‘real’ is not all we see and touch. Your brother taught you prudence and gave you the force of stamina.

The souvenir of a possible childhood lasted six years , six short years with the woman that was to become the grandmother of Benjamin, Solene, and Sebastian: these shooting stars with a life that was not to be yours. You left England at the age of 24, leaving on the platform your father, Thomas, with tears in his eyes. The current of your life flows slowly, your blood transperces and pumps through these words, this text. In the arms of your mother, a frail boy, the boy that was wrenched away from her arms so soon, too soon.

Perhaps one day you will be able to fly into the arms of all those you have loved, living and dead. You ask yourself when this will be possible. And then you remember the words of your first born, Sebastian. Your economic and social situation is abysmal, and he judges you, condemns you. The reactions of your so called family has been more traumatic than anything you have suffered in the past. Nobody but NOBODY is willing to consider that your two criminal acts were iatrogenic reactions to the very chemicals that were supposed to help you. You think again of your mother.  Where is the little boy that loved and was loved by her? He is at the same time in the present and there 50 years earlier.

You have still tenderness and compassion for those with you recluse. You see their submission and servitude. They walk in sadness, their heads bent looking at their shoes. They are the annihilated of the society with an incurable illness and a broken brain. But you look these administrators in the face to say you know their mafia and their methods. The interned recluse needs love and you have found the strength to find it. He needs a coffee, a cigarette and a listening, caring ear. You have found these elements for yourself and you give them to the other tortured souls without hesitation. They know you, your strength. It is difficult but evident that the ‘carers’ are collaborators of a system that negates all human rights and that they are more than satisfied to keep human beings in conditions that their pet animals know nothing of. All this for a salary and a few avantages. This IS Vichy 73 years on.

The idea of progress resounds strongly in this damned place. As if the teachings of our ancestors were all false, even evil. To advance in life is not a collective effort but personal, even intimate. If there is progress, let it be to promote peace and tranquility of spirit for every man. You realise that psychiatry does the opposite in the name of progress of which there is none. When you read Whitaker, Gøtzsche, and Read, you were filled with peace, a profound assurance that your symptoms are the very expression of an ailment that goes beyond your intimate universe. The same peace as found in a revelation 39 years ago. Something that was revealed to you that you keep to yourself, inneffacable, the strength of destiny.

Silence. In silence lies the potential for expression, being yours in that it flows like the conscience of a confined river that overflows from its bed with all the force of nature, indomitable. Time is present,  butterflies changing from their larva form and magpies joining together to insure their longevity. It’s the end of winter and springtime is in the very consciousness of the trees. Its bounty constantly refound, in all its magnificence that you adore so. Your face is white and pale reflecting the suns light at this the end of winter. Is it luminessness, luminescence, or luminosity? It appears charged. The light reveals everything, defines everything, the humiliation, the indignity,  the indignation. Faith and hope, there are so many that have as much as yourself. Despite the major tranquillisers, there is something that is missing, indiscernable but that you will articulate.

A strong frost is feared, the apricot trees in this region of France will be affected; they are in flower. Today it is cold, light rain and morning mist that covers the tops of the trees there, on the hillside above the river. It is time for the melancholic thought of what your life could have been. Before the age of six years old, your life was marvelous.  Full of hope and a calm confidence, contained.  A plenitude that has never left you. You still feel it in your guts. The delaceration with your mother, its violence, has never left you. Very young, you were thrown into an uncertain world, deprived of your emotional bearings. You have sought after since then the love of your Mother that was so natural and comfortable.

Your Father was crude, uncouth, and violent. He was a policeman. As such he was able to conceal his violence towards his family, at the same time physical and psychological. The stature of your Father prevented the social services getting involved. His authority was cumbersome to say the least for yourself, your Mother, and your brother Gerald. From that time your soul has been errant ; it’s only recently that you have found some peace of mind.

Some of your memories are of extreme violence. The fact that you report this violence of which you were victim takes on the importance of a sacrement, an obligation, and you will do it with an indefatigable fervor. Thirty two years ago you left your native land hoping to find liberty in France, not knowing how to pronounce the name of the town where you found yourself. Then the horror,  the fear that you experienced and that you provoked in others. The suspicion, the contemptous looks of those with no understanding, hostile. These words wrapped up in so much scientific verbiage which are everything but. You doubt whether this artificial rhetoric is the only reason for your slavery although it has certainly kept it in place.

The curious come and look but you remain dispassionnate  and at peace. You receive insults but you stay calm, your spirit lit by your interior strength. The words courage and hope resound with the fidelity of your determination. ‘Happy those of poor spirit, for the kingdom of the heavens will be theirs’.

To be thirsty and hungry for justice is your fate, a weight forever present in your life. But your discoveries will be theirs also, this cosa nostra, a mafia where everything is done to find the failure of another and to get profit and recognition. All they can imagine to say is that they lack means.  In my views it’s not material that lack but intellectual and scientific acumen. Your psychiatrists are idiots that cannot hear truth if it struck them down so you adapt to their language that is both poor and obscene. The ‘experts’ are invested with a doubtful authority. They traumatise you with their all knowing judgments, worse than any symptom.

You know what it is to be apart. You acutley feel these opinions that categorize you and seal you in a hermetic box. You are not even pitied, just looked upon as if you were a caged animal with curiosity. They observe and then condemn you. They ask you things that have nothing to do with your life. Always, they try to inflict upon you chemical strait jackets, metaphorical strait jackets, when they don’t restrain you to your bed, so you can hardly breathe. They work it so you don’t miss your children too much and so that you don’t reflect on the brut violence that has been your experience. The crux is that they call you ‘ill ’ whilst they are completely crazy. You looked upon France as a place of refuge, yes a refugee, somewhere where you were not looked upon as a broken brain.  What deception to find no therapautic value in France whatsoever.

It’s been 7 years now that the war in Syria has been waged. 350 0000 dead. Lives broken, decimated,  the loss of loved ones. It’s the eve of springtime and powerful voices speak of ‘security’, reform and terrorism. They are lifted above the voices and conversations of ordinary citizens. They find themselves all powerful. ‘Down with the privaleges of the few, they sing as if in harmony, the retired must pay more taxes, they warble through the media that relays their shit with excuberance and dilectation. Life merits better than this, the inhabitants seem to be in a trance, tetanized by fear of the ‘terroristes‘ and the ‘mentally ill’, in fear of the ‘criminals’ and ‘delinquants‘. The media danses a gigue around this with ‘adapted’ language and texts which seek to profit from the situation as much as they can. You are tired of this atmosphere which takes away your liberty quasi-permanently. You want to shout ‘wake up!’ but who would hear you in the cacophony of voices each drowning out the other. The mist once again covers the tops of the trees; you walk around the park twice, the air is cool, the light pale, it’s invigorating, it’s à beautiful day.

Civilians flee the tanks, planes, bullets, and bombs. They are left to the mercy of the unknown and themselves. The woman, who is never named in order to protect her, welcomes refugees from Syria, Soudan, and Libyia.  She is one of the few who have understood what it is to be a good Christian, to give to the unknown and needy, to overcome one’s fear of others, to give bread and a little love. The fact of giving, without posing any questions, chemical products, annihilates any sympathy for the perpetrators and administrators of these chemicals that cause the deaths of the unseen and unheard of by iatrogenic ‘accidents’. The practitioners defend their interests vigourously, backed up by Novartis and its remunerated training protocols in order to be a ‘consultant ‘ and contribute ‘data’ to earn even more. Earn is not the right word ; conflict of interest is more appropriate. At worst these payments are no less than bribes in order to contribute to the ‘market research ‘ which is no more than bias and lies. Treleptal is one of her favourite poisons. In the United States, Novartis was condemned to pay over 400 million dollars for the promotion of this poison for other uses other than which it was conceived.  It is used here in France mostly for other uses than for which it was intended. It was conceived for partial epilepsy.

‘Happy are those that cry, for they will be consoled’.

You ask yourself if it is appropriate to ask pardon for having been so deeply distressed. You consider your father’s physical and psychological violence unpardonable. ‘You’re a weight that l have always had to carry’, or again,  ‘you were an accident’, and again, ‘you‘re the runt of the litter’.  Or your brother who warned your future ex wife, ‘he changes like the moon’. You think that his materially comfortable life may have had something to do with unknown links to Jansen, or Johnson and Johnson. Your father had shares in the pharmaceutical industry and your brother would have gladly signed your death warrant.

The wood finch visits you with great regularity. The bird feeder that you have placed on your terrace attracts the blue tits who in turn feed the finchs as they let fall the sunflower seeds from the feeder to the ground where the finchs sing to attract the tits.

You realise with horror that your two criminal acts were provoked by a paradoxical reaction to the neuroleptics that you were given a little time before the two acts. This happened after a cold turkey withdrawal that lasted six months before each act. The ‘experts’ attribute these acts to a hypothetic ‘illness’ and not to the ingurgetation of the chemicals. Nevertheless it is true that the laboratories have a great responsibility for the torture you are subjected to in being forced to take these neuro toxins. The conflicts of interest are what drives these doctors and ‘experts’ to defend tooth and nail a  pretended authenticity of their diagnosis (DSM).

The magnolias are blooming profusley.

Agota Kristoff talks of enemy languages in her short autobiographic story of her childhood. The only language that you’ve known that was kind and loving and understandable was the English of your mother with her strong German accent. You have effectively two enemy languages: English and French. Even if you realise that both these tongues when used by poets and novelists can be very beautiful, you have known them to be used as sledge hammers and bullets and bombs by your torturers: the administrators or doctors and the white coated ‘carers’ and others.

It is frightful to see that man has become a scavengeur using money to justify this state of affairs.  You do what you can eating vegetarian and observing the nature that surrounds you.

When the judge of liberty and detention (yes that’s her name literally translated) sees you, you are metaphysically bruised by her exclamation, ‘Mr H, Your destiny leaves me entirely indifferent’. When your practitioner administrator learns of your numerous side effects, she ignores them completely.

You admire the work of Joseph Zobel. His words have revealed to future generations the racist fondations of the society in which he lived. You would, like him, inform the future population, of what it is to be permanently sedated, a torture unequaled in the annals of modern medicine.

About the Writer:

Edward Walter is my pen name.

I am British by birth, French by adoption. I have had serious issues with the mental health ‘services’ and the way they treat people. I am convinced by the work of John Read and Lucy Johnstone, to name but two. I have three children and have lived in France since 1986, when l moved here at the age of 24. I like reading contemporary French literature, authors such as Stéphanie Chaillou, Claudie Gallay, Claire Berest and Anne Sophie Subilia; the choice is huge and the quality breathtaking. l’m now translating a seminar for Poetdox by Lucy Johnstone which should be diffused on YouTube in February 2019. I am actively engaged in trying to change the mental health system, which l find corrupt and antiquated in the extreme.