DEDICATION NOT MEDICATION…by David Burke

+++  An essay on the Plight of the Mentally Afflicted [reprinted, with occasional editing, from the May 2008, Vol. 22, No. 4 of Island Catholic News]  ++  I am legally bound to take a shot at the Eric Martin meds clinic.  Missing this shot means ultimately being arrested.  I’m not sure the meds are the true answer to my problems.  A little more cash from the government would smooth over dire emotional issues.  ++  I’ve had my wars with the psychiatric system.  In the eighties I was so disgusted by my treatment that I fled the country for the States and lived there for three and a half years, happily unmedicated.  We’ve all seen ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.’  Well, part of it is true.  ++  I recall so many brutal lessons learned in Vancouver’s notorious Riverview in the eighties.  I developed a lifelong hatred of the practice of over-medication.  It seemed to me – and I had no way to know that I was right – that to medicate someone, to alter the chemistry of their brain in order to have them love you was a practice that belonged in the Roman Coliseum not the modern hospital.  ++  Being a quiz kid from a way back and potential Rhodes scholar, I long ago realized that my problem was not a chemical imbalance in the brain but a very faulty awareness of the exact ramifications of anti-social behaviour.  ++  All through the sixties and seventies, I was something of a rebel in hair, deportment, speech, drug use, sexual mores and politics and so when I found myself heavily medicated in 1982, behind bars, with no rights, I had to assume that I had not erred on the side of caution and as a deeply religious person, had to renew my bonds with the Saviour and put myself totally in his hands.  ++  Riverview was an absolute nightmare.  A ward with fifteen men scribbling and smoking furiously.  I became a heavy smoker then and there, and began a lifelong battle with the noxious weed, trying to find some humour in smoking two packs a day at times.  The food was terrible.  We had no rights.  We were totally subject to the whims and sarcasms of the overpaid guards and waiting long hours for the effete doctors to put in a mystical appearance.  Sometimes they didn’t show at all but appeared days later, tanned and refreshed, having been on vacation.  ++  It was more than a study in annoyance.  It was a positive ordeal and by then I was already a minor star of the stage, screen and television and all my credits seemed to count for naught.  No one cared what I had done in a previous existence.  I prayed on a daily basis to the good Lord and sometimes my prayers were answered.  I found a little solace in reading and every night prayed for sleep to deliver me to the Paradise I had been promised by the Anglican Church, as the great grandson of the Bishop of British Columbia.  ++ What had I done to deserve such a fate?  Merely broken a large window after seeing some junkies shooting up at a party.  I lost all faith then and there in the significance of the Crown, the efficacy of British Justice and the fairness of the Courts.  I had absolutely no rights, subject to a thirty day assessment to see if I was fit to stand trial.  Mentally, I prepared to leave Canada for good, forsake my family and cut all ties with my friends and artistic support team.  They extracted from us four vials of blood every three days.  We were being used as guinea pigs.  ++  One day the Lord Jesus Christ walked through the wall and placed his hand on my shoulder just as I was frozen immobile reeling from an allergic reaction to the drug haloperidol, invented by the Nazis in 1942.  He said “All will be well, you will live to triumph over these fools.”  ++  There are more rights for mental patients in Britain and the U.S.  Canada lags atrociously behind in the treatment of the different, the wayward, the confused and the enlightened.  Of this I am sure.  And the Province of B. C. has the worst record in Canada.  ++  I got into hot water all through the eighties and nineties.  I just couldn’t get it through my thick skull that I was dealing with a brutal, totalitarian system that cared nothing for gardens, poetry, Shakespeare or magic, that payed itself handsomely for doing next to nothing and vacationed every year in Florida.  ++  Finally, in 2000, the penny dropped.  I lost nearly everything in a housing fiasco and had a good talk with myself and the Saviour over money, rights, property and the figment of artistic recognition.  I’m happier now but my God-given rights are still being violated.  I’m 55 and thinking of spending my golden years in Britain where they elect loonies to high office, not drug them and beat them with rods.  ++  Not to sound like Conrad Black, in Britain I would be eligible for an MBE for deeds accomplished .  It’s a different set of rules.  I love my Canada but it has almost destroyed me and if it weren’t for a poetic gift that needs to be shared and a circle of close friends, I would long ago have departed this planet for good.  ++  [This essay appeared on page 4 of the current issue of ICN with a black and photo of the author taken from a Concerned Citizens' Coalition 2005 campaign poster with the legend: 'VOTE DAVID BURKE, Freelance Cinematographer, Mental Health Advocate, Cultural Policy Advocate, VICTORIA CITY COUNCIL,' designed by 'Goyo de la Rosa.']  +++