A note on the title: "Mad bench" (疯板凳) plays on the Chinese expression "sitting on a cold bench" (坐冷板凳), meaning to be sidelined, overlooked, or left out. The title turns "cold" into "mad": a place at the margins that the writer cannot quite bring herself to leave.
Sometimes I wonder why I can't let go of these different names: "mad person," "qinlizhe," "patient," "mental patient." Why can't I let go of the person suffering behind them, or of an identity like this?
Notice that I'm talking about identity here, not experience.
Sometimes a person has relatively little experience but a strong sense of identity; sometimes they have plenty of experience without identifying very strongly at all. I started thinking about this because I've also had many experiences involving gender and sexuality. They, too, could be described as complicated, strange, and miserable. They, too, have directly or indirectly contributed to my distress. Yet I've devoted relatively little of my time to work in those areas.
Why?
Thinking it over: I'm a woman, and I like women, but I only came to recognize that after I had already grown up quite a bit. Before then, I'd also spent a long time trying to live in relatively gender-friendly surroundings. Add to that my distant relationship with my family: I don't much care what they think, so coming out to them was never really an issue. There are other factors, of course. I also like men. In fact, I don't think I care very much whether someone is a man, a woman, or another gender. If I like someone, it's because they are that particular person.
Growing up, I didn't experience much stigma or fear around this. I wasn't going to be sent to an institution to have it corrected, or bullied by classmates because of it. So although my experiences have been varied, I never really settled into that box. In a sense, I've been very lucky. For most of my life, after all, I grew up looking like a straight cis woman.
But my experience as a woman has also involved a great deal of misfortune. I've been through several rounds of the awful things most women have to face. Quite naturally, long before I knew there was such a thing as feminism, I was already living by principles I'd worked out for myself. So my identification with being a woman is stronger.
If you ask what kind of person I am, then, I could be a woman; I could also be queer. By queer, I mean being difficult to define, or refusing definition. But calling myself bisexual, for example, feels a little awkward. I've never called myself that. I've just let things happen. Of course, "letting things happen" also takes luck and the right conditions. Another possibility is that I simply haven't explored that far, and haven't lived enough stories along that line yet.
Still, I keep noticing how much gender and mental health have in common: what counts as normal, what doesn't; being endlessly required to prove what you are or aren't, or to show that you're safe for other people, not a threat, and so on and so on. That makes the questions around gender fairly easy for me to relate to.
So, back to the question: what have my experiences in mental health been like?
I like sending pieces to mental-health accounts on WeChat. I like finding obscure things to read. I like the history of anti-psychiatry, and I like Mad Studies now. I like answering people's questions online, and arguing with people online too.
In fact, the period of my life when I was actually taking medication and seeing doctors was very, very short. At one point I went to several hospitals in quick succession and spent a great deal of money. When all they brought me was pain, I quickly put that supposed solution behind me.
I don't give a damn whether anyone thinks I'm a good patient. And I don't give a damn about that bullshit that being ill means taking medication for the rest of your life. I intend to live my own way. I also know that when certain so-called professionals read this, they'll say, "She's still ill." Fuck you.
My reason for staying alive was simple: during my repeated suicide attempts, every healthcare worker I encountered treated me appallingly. It made me feel that failing to die and having to face them again would be an unbearable humiliation. In that case, I might as well live.
I'll live more freely than they do, more honestly, more "healthily."
If I wanted to be an inspiring model of recovery, I could sound like so many people I see in the news and on WeChat: I was in such pain back then, but someone helped me, I took this medication and had that therapy, and most importantly I persevered, and now I'm well. I often wonder how much of these accounts is true and how much isn't. I'm not so bitter that I can't recognize someone's survival as a victory worth celebrating. I just really dislike these linear lives. They had certain conditions in their favour, and luck too. I wish them well, but I'm not them.
Whether or not someone has ever had a diagnosis, I always feel that anyone's life could still fall apart. Even if things are good now, they could go wrong again. But I also believe that a life that's fallen apart can get better. I just can't accept the idea that someone will be broken forever, or well forever. Nor do I want to play the person whose route to getting better perfectly matches the public's expectations. That's pandering.
Honestly, I haven't been to a psychiatric hospital or used psychological services in years. I've still had moments of despair and collapse, but I'm still alive. The marks psychiatry left on me have become very faint. I was never actually confined in a hospital, made to do things I didn't want to do, or checked every day for pills hidden under my tongue. When I didn't want to take medication, I didn't. Am I a service user? Not really, it seems. A consumer? I haven't consumed much of anything in this area. A survivor? What did I survive, then? It seems I survived not just psychiatry, but many, many things.
What I mean is that I could stop paying so much attention to mental health. I could live as someone who simply doesn't discuss it. Or I could become terribly affected: if anyone asked, I'd give the impression that I'd been through so much, but now it was all behind me and I was serenely above it.
Why am I still here? Why? Why stay attached to a field so many people go out of their way to avoid?
The first thing that comes to mind is a sense of regret. Sometimes I'm speaking for other people, not myself. When I hear that someone has died by suicide, or see it happen, I find it very difficult to say that I'm a different kind of person from them. "Regret" isn't quite the right word either. For some of those people, it wasn't a matter of regret. It was a full stop, something neutral, perhaps even a certainty that they were finally deciding for themselves. If we meet beneath the earth, I'll still wish them well.
I also think of my anger. Even though my concentrated encounters with psychiatry and counselling lasted only three or four years, I can't find a single happy memory in them.
And I can't let it go. Watching people treat those disciplines and their full-of-holes knowledge as truth; watching people with authority spout whatever they please. I can't let it go.
Honestly, I also find it interesting. I've found some fun in it. I enjoy the feeling of randomly scaring the hell out of someone online. If I meet up with my friends, does that mean "four or five seriously mentally ill people actually getting together"?
It's a hard question to answer. That's precisely why I wanted to write this piece and think it through. Maybe I just can't let go. There must still be something I can't let go of, something keeping me here. In some professionals' eyes, my condition must surely count as cured by now. Or let's be fashionable and call it recovery. But I'd still rather occupy that madder position.
Honestly, I haven't thought about suicide for a long time. But I also want to say that my pain has never disappeared. It's become more complicated, more closely woven, more changeable. As I've grown, it's taken on a strange life of its own.
Still, refusing to leave this mad bench, telling other people I'm mad, comes at a price. Every now and then, I pay it. Looking at the people who fear me or shut me out, I think: oh, I'm actually more "normal" than you. Or perhaps there's another reason: as long as I'm willing to say I've had a diagnosis, the way I live now might give someone a little more to think about. It might break open some of their pitifully narrow imaginings. If it can do that, I don't mind saying I've received a supposedly severe diagnosis, even though I have nothing but contempt for the logic behind that diagnostic system.
It's hard to sit steadily on the mad bench. I'm at ease living with that unease. Until the end of time.