On monday, february the 17th, Matias and Louis had a skype meeting with Paula Tome. Pauyla Tome is a mental health activist in Spain, she gives lectures on alternative treatments on psychosis from a very personal perspective, since she has been a patient herself. Now she is finishing her master degree in philosophy, writing her thesis about the mental health care from a feminist and political point of view.
First she told her story. Thirteen years ago she got two crises in which she ended up in a hospital. During the paranoias she experienced, she was convinced that people wanted to kill her, so the telephone, the post, TV… everything was used to spy her; fear was the ruling emotion. Fear was defenitely the leading theme in her relation to psychosis.
She was under treatment for 5 months, but then she decided to reduce the medication little by little because she considered that her personality was fading out. Since then she only enterred in four more crises, which lasted about a week.
What she did was to reduce the possible stress generators in her life, as it was: her job, her sexuality, her mental condition… She quitted her job and created her own little business, she came out of the closet and she communicated to all her friends what has happened to her. Doing so, some of the friends decided to support her, so in case of another psychosis they would be prepared, in stead of being surprised or scared, they would adapt it into their routine. This network of close friends and relatives was definitely the biggest support to gain progress and reduction of her fears…
With the group of friends, they made an intense analysis about the four crisis that occurred during those 13 years. For her, it was the only way to feel in control of the delirium. Understanding the political context, the philosophical context, the social relations and repercussions of an episode empowers her to face the following crises.
She also opened a blog where she keeps posting all the conclusions and information that she started to collect about her and other patients and about alternative treatments. In the blog we could find a lot of lectures with a big variety in points of view…
This is one example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgS79hz1saI
She is not against pharmacological help, what she claims for is a better information system. For example, from time to time, if she feels that her mind is overloaded, and for a couple of days she could not sleep, she just takes a sleeping pill. But, one sleeping pill form time to time is nothing in comparison with the side effects of the thirteen years of medicaments that where prescribed to her.
One of the main problems and difficulties for the understanding of the mental disorders is the tragedy that it throws up. We have learned to relate with them in a dramatic way; for example, lets look to the representation of it in cinema, these cases are used to create drama or horror. This drama only keeps the patients in a lower level and weakens them to fight for their rights… Like this they remain in a position of the victimised and there is a no access to alternative treatments.
We are working on it…
(Written in collaboration with Louis Vanhaberbeke)