I fought my way out of the “mental health” system and off of drugs by myself as a teenager, but I continued to carry heavy shame and confusion about that experience for years before learning RC as a young adult. 


I remember hearing Janet Foner (the then International Liberation Reference Person for “Mental Health” Liberation) speak at an International Liberation Reference Persons’ gather-in in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, a few years after I started Co-Counseling. I told her I was a fellow ex-inmate. She held me in her arms while I sobbed and discharged deep, early terror. 


Confusion about “mental health” oppression and especially ex-inmates’ oppression runs deep in the wide world, and internalized “mental health” oppression often creates blocks that keep me from showing myself openly. But Janet exuded such total clarity—that people are good, that we have brilliant minds, that discharge is good, and that there is nothing wrong with any of us—that it created the safety that let me discharge with her without feeling pulled to hide. 


When I went to my first ex-inmate workshop, I felt intense restimulation of distress recordings from my psychiatric inmate experience. During the first evening of the workshop, I was so terrified that I felt like I physically could not walk or move. I spent the workshop introductions lying on the ground and feeling like I had been hit by a bus. 


Janet was totally unfazed and kept warmly reaching to pull me out of that deep restimulation and toward a warm, non-urgent, non-worried human connection that changed the way I have related to my ex-inmate experience ever since. She held out that ex-psychiatric inmates are freedom fighters: that the oppressive society targets us for showing ourselves as humans in ways that we are “not supposed to,” that it uses the “mental health” system to punish us as examples to the rest of the world of what happens if you don’t conform, and that continuing to show ourselves despite the repression inflicted upon us is an act of courage. 


I learned that “mental health” oppression is an enforcement mechanism to uphold the irrational, destructive systems of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, class oppression, young adults’ oppression, Gay oppression, and other oppressions by targeting people who “break the rules” by not successfully assimilating into the norms of the oppressor group.