Carol Hebald

Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence: Click here to listen to the Archive of my April 11th 2007 Internet radio show on Transcending Mental Illness. (21 KB)

THE HEART TOO LONG SUPPRESSED: A CHRONICLE OF MENTAL ILLNESS:

THE HEART TOO LONG SUPPRESSED documents, from a personal viewpoint, schizophrenia as an unconscious choice. It is my aim that readers might recognize similar choices in themselves, or in loved ones, who have succumbed to the seeming certainty that there are none.

In tracking the development of my former illness from infancy through middle age, I place within a historical context my and my helpers’ errors in judgment. I pinpoint what went wrong. What is the meaning of schizophrenia? To answer I re-enter the experience and clarify in human terms those “dissociative states of being” and “splits between mind and feeling” by which we are clinically defined. Is there really a private world peculiar to schizophrenics? In taking the reader through mine, I show an inner world of dream and desire at odds with an outer world of fact and experience common to us all. For what did I earn my label? How and why did I inadvertently court it? By what means did I get well? Answers to these questions point to my contribution to the field.

I am not the first ex-patient to report that conditions in most psychiatric hospitals are breeding grounds for the eruption of psychotic behavior, but I hope to be among the last. To this end I address their ideal purpose as havens for the release of intolerable and so-called inappropriate feelings.

Finally, I question the widely-held belief that schizophrenia is a brain disease. Hospital records indicate no biomedical condition underlay mine. I am an exception, others exist. Why, despite us, is the international psychiatric community so eager to embrace this latest “definitive” theory? Is it because it lets them, patient families who foot their bills, and patients themselves, off the hook insofar as responsibility for the illness is concerned? This implicit, if not explicit, question lies at the heart of my book.


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