Mindfreedom Oral Histories: Joe S. Balletta

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Oral Histories

 

Joe S. Balletta

Born: September 06 1947

 

Click here for contact information.

 

Currently Doing: Joe is a gourmet cook. He also enjoys botany,

creative writing, and fine art. Joe volunteers at several charitable

organizations, including SCI.

 

Psychiatric Labels: Manic Depression, Obsessive-Compulsive, General

Anxiety Disorder

 

Mental Health Experience: Outpatient, Psychiatric Drugs, Coercive

Treatment

 

Click here for psychiatric drugs taken in the past.

 

Off Psychiatric Drugs Since: 1991

 

Recovery Methods: Family/Friends, Gardening, Cooking, Art/Music,

Self-Help, Peer Support, One-on-one Therapy, Diet, Spirituality,

Meditation, Literature

 

Greatest Obstacle: Being a unique individual, I'm different than the

people I depend on.

 

Brief History: My story with the mental health system began in 1985 in

a small county in Florida. At that time, I was not where I wanted to

be in our society, and had been going through a messy divorce for a

number of years. I had moved from where I grew up, which was in the

northeast, to the southeast. This was traumatic, as there were

differences in terms of the culture. These situations combined to

stress me out to the point where I had a nervous breakdown.

 

I did not have too many resources. I was alone. Even though my mother

and brothers had moved to Florida by that time, these family members

could not really understand what was going on and were not able to be

supportive, so I turned to the local mental health system for help. I

did not have a good idea of what to expect from that experience.

 

My problems at that time involved feeling insecure, feeling a great

deal of fear, having great anxiety and having stress from not knowing

how I was going to survive. I was dependent on the mental health

system. I felt very helpless.

 

I found that the mental health system lacks knowledge of how to treat

people, individually, and in general. Their basic mode of working with

people was to get them adjusted " back into society " in a " normal "

way--not to develop an understanding of what they were going through.

My problem was that I had undergone a lot of trauma from actual

experiences, which caused me to have a hard time fitting into American

culture.

 

When I went to the mental health system, I felt that my problems were

compounded by somewhat of a punishing factor. They indicated to me

that I was going to get back out there and conform to the standards no

matter what. They did not show that they really cared about what I

wanted or needed. My problems were also compounded by the attitude of

those people in the mental health system. No one tried to understand

me as an individual. They assumed that most people in the system were

brain dead, retarded, and had no potential.

 

The activities they had us do involved putting us in a big room with a

pool table and ping pong tables. They would just leave people in this

room on their own for awhile and then they would have " therapy "

sessions. This basically involved people venting anger. It was not

directed towards rehabilitation or towards real therapy. It was also

assumed that you were going to be just as damaged and fearful of a

person for the rest of your life, so what did it matter? If you just

played ping pong mindlessly, that was okay. But I felt that was more

damaging. That kind of attitude hurts people.

 

I did have a psychologist in Florida who used cognitive therapy. He

was an intuitive man with good insight. This kind of therapy helped

because it was based on something; it was intelligent therapy,

intellectual therapy. I tend to be an intellectual person, so I was

able to use this therapy. When I had certain feelings, I was able to

use a thought rubric to rationally look at them. If you are feeling a

certain way, why are you feeling it? Is it based on anything

objective? That kind of therapy was somewhat helpful, but it did not

really take care of the core fears.

 

Almost from the very beginning, I experienced 99.9% of the psychiatric

drugs I took as being toxic for my body and having terrible side

effects. One of the drugs I took was a benzodiazepine, like Xanax.

What it did was to mimic my symptoms at a heightened state. Also, not

only are they addictive, but they have withdrawal effects as well. If

you have panic or tend to have anxiety, what these things do is they

make those situations even more acute.

 

My opinion is that they're not addressing the real causes for these

problems. Instead, they just try to contain the symptoms. When you

withdraw, you can see what the biological approach does—it masks the

symptoms. The feeling from using the majority from these psychiatric

drugs was horrible. I had to actually take little bits to withdraw,

and I needed support to do that because it was just like withdrawing

from any other major drug, such as heroin or something else.

 

There were also antidepressants that really never took care of the

depression. What they did was to take away the reaction I had from

being depressed, the emotional anxiety. The way I see depression is

that one gets tired, isn't motivated, and then at the same time has

fears and anxieties. It took away some of the anxiety but it did not

take away the depression. In other words, you did not become

motivated. Depression actually makes you more chronically fatigued.

One of the side effects is that you would be more fatigued and so

naturally dealing with your depression would be ludicrous when

something is making you more fatigued.

 

And that's the experience I had in general with most of these

so-called psychiatric drugs. They made me feel worse and I knew that

much. Therefore, I never really took them for any great length of time.

 

I think the whole trick to recovery and the self-help movement is to

introduce the idea that you can tend to yourself as a person that has

something, you can do for yourself. You can help yourself and it's

this idea that is important. I've always applied it and that's why I

have been able to end my dependence on the mental health system. I

know I would regress by reaching out to them and thinking that they

would provide any help.

 

When I got into the system, it was not something I had to profoundly

think about. It was just obvious that the system was toxic. It was

noxious. Some of the very fears I had, some of the very anxieties we

re-edified, reinforced within that system, and I found that very

interesting. I knew that I had to find out how to get my health better

outside of that system. I worked at looking outside of it, as I've

always been more interested in alternatives and self-help groups.

 

I have begun to overcome my core fears more so than I ever have in the

past. I find that one of the things that I had to learn myself was

that you have to get beyond your fears. You have to just do things,

and not think about it. I think what the mental health system

perpetuates is that it sets people up. It actually locks them in to

those excessive and impulsive patterns that have been no good for them

or no good for anybody.

 

I think spirituality plays a role. It is the sense that you are okay,

no matter what is going on with you. It is more of a heart thing.

People have to go through a whole cerebral trip to get to this very

simple thing. It is simple. It is not something you think about or

analyze a lot but something you just believe in. I think it works

because of its simplicity.

 

I have found that books are important. I have read a lot, including

Thomas Szasz. I don't agree with him absolutely. I have read all kinds

of different philosophies. When you read a book, you associate with

that person's spirit who wrote that book. There are different ways one

could have support or spiritual communion, through books or directly

through people--whatever works.

 

I also volunteer sometimes through charitable work for local mental

health groups such as Support Coalition International because I just

feel that it's my duty to do so. I like what they're doing and I hope

they succeed. And I have a lot of other projects. I'm very much an

independent person.

 

I am hoping to have a foods business in a couple of years. I grow

plants and I do computer art. Computers, art, travel to France, just a

lot of things. I would say that I'm an artist for the most part and I

like to write.

 

To me, the most important thing in a person's recovery process is to

know that someone cares for you, someone outside yourself, and that

you can care for yourself and that you can love yourself and get over

those demons that haunt us all, that drive us crazy. You have to get

up with some love in your heart and you have to be able to know that

you can do something that you love. It could be a person, it could be

a project, it could be anything.

 

I think we live in a very arrogant culture. We live in a culture that

if you don't fit in, you're punished. Since we don't have a culture

that has a lot of alternative models, I don't think we're near a

civilized culture. We pride ourselves as an individual culture but

actually we do not respect individuality. That's the reason people get

into the mental health system.

 

My ideal of the mental health system would be to get right down to the

core of that person's problem. Be objective and give them what they

really need to recover. Actually, I think if we were more advanced

beings in a culture, there would be no need for a mental health

system. The whole idea of the mental health system indicates a problem

in our culture and perhaps a problem with our species.

 

Interviewer's Comments: Joe is an extremely intelligent, thoughtful,

and articulate individual. It was obvious from our conversation that

he has a deep and profound understanding of his own experience and the

experience of his fellow humans.

 

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