Dave

Hello ‘stigma’, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

(Sound of silence, Simon and Garfunkel, 1964)

I’ve seen quite a lot written from a mental health point of view that references Simon and Garfunkel’s classic hit, but when I look back on my life now I realise that my darkness was born out of stigma and discrimination. It wasn’t in the addiction and offending, the homelessness and incarceration, at the time I thought that was just what life was. It was more in the way I became labelled, diagnosed and defined, by systems, health, justice and others, that positioned me as ‘other’. It was quite insidious, not necessarily personalised, but still intentional. I was destined to become one of the marginalised, the oppressed, the punished, that our systems need to validate themselves. Our mental health and addiction services needed people to ‘fix’, or not. Our criminal justice system needed people to punish, people they could call ‘bad’. Our society needed people to oppress, to use to meet the needs of fulfilling their own egos and agendas of systemic oppression.

My stigma, the way I was marginalised and largely written off from a very young age, became my friend. It allowed me to build an identity, based on not meeting society’s expectation of ‘normal’ but by being anti-social, being ‘bad’. I found consolation in my badness, I celebrated it, I identified with it, without even knowing that’s what I was doing. The seeds of that identity were surreptitiously implanted in my brain, in my psyche, in my ways of being and doing, and those seeds still remain. It was the stigma, not the behaviours themselves, that embedded me in that ‘other’ world.

My trauma didn’t initially lie in any sort of physical abuse in my childhood, although that would come later. It was more a case of neglect, or absence of guidance and control. Broken home from a young age, no positive role models, plenty of other ones, early alcohol and drug use. I was told I was intelligent but didn’t really connect with education. I connected with badness, which meant more alcohol and drugs. Before the age of 10 that was anything I could get my hands on to drink, by 11 it was cannabis and anything in the medicine cabinet, soon followed by LSD and other substances, by 13 it was heroin, and with that, I was well on my way to being a true 1%er!

In a mental health sense, there was anxiety and what they called conduct disorder; the term applied to people under 16 who would after that age be diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder. Early offending and engagement with the criminal justice system meant being thrown out of school, boy’s homes, borstal, youth prison, gangs, and then into the big house, jail. Most of my teenage years were in and out of jail and mental health institutions. I soon learned to put on masks, to pretend to be what I thought was acceptable in society, so I didn’t have to face the stigma of being me. That meant I became a bullshit artist, who had no idea of who I really was.

I eventually found recovery later in life, while serving a rather long prison sentence for serious methamphetamine offending. I’ve been in recovery for 16 years now and I’ve been out of prison for much of that. It took a while, but I have come to understand who I am, and today I stand comfortably in my own skin. I work in mental health and addiction, in a lived experience role, and get to work with people who are still lost in the world of addiction and offending, marginalisation and oppression, suffering from stigma and discrimination. I get to go into prisons and share my story with them, to inspire them, to try to activate their self-agency and motivate them to find their own sense of wellbeing.

I now have Post Grad qualifications and a master’s degree in law and get to guest lecture in both health and law at universities to people studying to become alcohol and drug clinicians, or lawyers. I bring a different lens to their study, a lived experience lens, challenging them to try to not just understand the huge impact of stigma and discrimination on the people they will be working with but how to give them tools to deal with it. I try to teach them that the darkness that people live in might lie as much in the stigma as in the behaviours. I talk about intersectionality, the part that trauma, poverty, deprivation, involvement in the criminal justice system and other factors play in mental health and addiction and criminal justice issues.

In my own darkness, no one ever told me what stigma and discrimination were, let alone how to deal with it, how to use positive affirmations, focus on my strengths not my deficits, how to prepare myself to challenge stigma when I either anticipated it or encountered it. We need to do that stuff, people just don’t know, so it’s our responsibility to talk about it. My stigma hasn’t gone anywhere, that vision, the seeds that were planted in my brain, they still remain. And the sound of silence? I see that as the lack of recognition still, not just of the impact of stigma and discrimination, but what we can do about it. Not enough of us dare to speak the truth, very few have the courage to challenge it, but we can do it. We can disturb the sound of silence.  

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.