free from what?

Until we are able to use our own words to tell our own stories, the context we find ourselves in–in this case, the psychiatric system–says our stories for us, and usually gets it wrong. In the context of the medical model, the story we learn to say is that we are ill. We begin to see ourselves as ill. We tell stories of illness, and the psychiatric system, and, by extension, society, accepts illness as the story of our distress. Being able to tell your own story–not the illness story–sets a new social context–one in which mad people are seen in a new light… In part, healing happens in the re-storying of our lives…. When he proclaimed, “You have a mental illness”, I’d responded, “I thought I had stories to tell.

And what science had revealed was this: prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.