The People They’d Like Us To Be: A New Language for a New Time

On 5 May 2026, I got access to my psychiatric records — 26 years’ worth of them — and, despite them being divorced from reality, bizarre in how they made some highly questionable people seem unquestionable, and because I hadn’t prepared myself for how they might affect me, I immediately had a strong, adverse reaction to them.

I felt small — tiny — and wanted to hide in a hole, away from the world. I had a strong, tense, knotted reaction in my stomach. I felt exposed, shamed and guilty. I’d adopted their persuasive truth, unable to withstand the sheer force of their words and concepts, forgetting the memory of just how incompetent and misguided the ‘mental health’ system could be.

I realised that this reaction wasn’t right and that cumulative self-talk had not proven to be a match for such a challenge. Such was the initial shock, however, that this realisation took time to enter the clear light of day. I wondered what I could do about it all. Why was I having this reaction, despite all the work I’d done on understanding myself and the world around me so thoroughly and from so many angles? I felt stranded and rooted to the spot, with no way forward. What could I do now?

In the end, I realised that, despite CST being effective for understanding information and thought processes, I hadn’t foreseen that I’d had blind spots: things which I needed to see and develop from, where I had to have them brought to me in such a way that I was confronted with an unavoidable situation which required demystification, new answers and an evolved way of working with CST.

While we need a language of rationality, we also need a language of the emotions, our bodies, and our core needs. But there also needs to be a language of the mundane, for the everyday, where most of us live our lives for the bulk of our time. All told, we can translate, make sense of, feel our way through, navigate, and make our worlds more worthy of living in. But how?

Extant approaches didn’t work for me nor many people I had encountered. The trouble with psychiatry, which has become a dominant approach, is that it tries to deal with the rational, fails through flaws it can’t see, and banishes emotional and relational context from the record, leaving both practitioners and service users constrained in a limiting and limited institutional straitjacket they don’t see, where psychiatry’s participants can fall into the trap of seeing this as success. We can do better. Much better.

What became apparent after my exposure to the psychiatric records was that I needed to feel and learn the languages of the emotions and the body, as well as those of biography and theory. These laid out a path to what my core human needs were, what I had to address, and how. This was the gap I’d not filled.

Searching around for resources, I came across ‘The Secret Language of the Body’, which deals with the nervous system and somatic work. While verbose, questionable in parts, and individualising, it nevertheless is a worthwhile read, offering me another angle and set of tools I could adapt into the overall approach of cumulative self-talk.

It worked. And off the back of that, another thing started to take effect thanks to all the work I’d already done with CST on the language of rationality. The information and skills I’d gathered and developed enabled me to recover quickly and led me to question the effect of the records, so that I gradually surmounted them, and could see them for what they are.

But how had I been so thoroughly taken in by them? It should have been obvious: they were wildly inaccurate, divorced from reality, inconsistent, amateurish, littered with events that never took place, mischaracterisations of what did, while leaving behind a series of misrepresentations which, over time, had fed themselves into the power and practices of psychiatry, leading to ongoing, unjust coercion which became the order of the day.

The popular debate around ‘mental health’ just doesn’t get it. It leads people into ways of thinking and being that don’t do them any favours. We hear figureheads like Stephen Fry and Ruby Wax selling ideas which lead to sanism and stigma, in turn slavishly promoting the status quo and their masters in psychiatry, while the mainstream ‘mental health community’ worship them because no-one offers anyone — not even Fry and Wax — a way to appreciate our options in a manner that reaches most people. Desperation and power wins the day, while better alternatives seem beyond them for the foreseeable future.

I, too, have been desperate, drugged and socially engineered into messages from institutions and other social structures, groups and individuals, that I’d lived my previous life unable to adequately question. Many people in the ‘mental health community’ have a hunch that something’s wrong, but lack the hermeneutical resources to be able to frame it in a meaningful way, so consumed are they with the ‘common sense’ myths around popular discussions of psychiatric approaches.

The messages from these narratives and scripts offer their victims narrow options of subject positions, identities, and ways of being, as people are sold a packaged version of who to be which only serves to embed the kind of treatment that they’d never accept if they knew the full picture.

The trouble is psychologists, like psychiatrists, can get people to fall into the trap of believing that we need testimonial justice from imbalanced relationships with officials paid to serve the kind of function we should expect from other people in our communities and society.

But in the absence of a thriving community and society, what can the atomised individual of neoliberalism do in society as it currently stands? Recognition and validation, for instance, can be achieved via a rounded characterisation of ourselves and those we know. We can craft a better blueprint — a workable theory — of the society we find ourselves in and that which we hope for. We can develop confidence in our own narrative, with its own messages, by taking our time to develop a version of events we become so familiar with that having confidence in it becomes second nature.

We can also craft our own resources, demystifying the core needs we may have been yearning for across the course of our lives, realising that when we cry out for testimonial justice from servants of the economy and the state, we’re yearning for what we don’t need from people who can never give it to us in any substantial sense.

Recalling times when our needs have been met, even in ways we couldn’t see at the time, nullifies the magnetism of the formal relationships we later seek testimonial justice from. We learn to see that we were never going to get it so we could address the core of what nurtures and fulfils us. Appreciating this, we can then create, cultivate, and nourish meaningful relationships — old and new — that matter far more than what are fundamentally little more than temporary economic exchanges with officials.

Recognition and validation — being taken seriously and having a sense of belonging — becomes more of a process than the content alone, where memories of where we’ve had it, and where we can then get it, enable us to move forward with purpose to approaches more likely to get us what we need.

Those are the building blocks of a better, less hierarchical, egalitarian, balanced network of intimates, groups and communities of people. With that, who needs an official rubber stamping something we’ve never realistically needed? It does require us to work towards the kind of hermeneutical resources that make it all possible, but if that’s what it takes to improve matters, what’s there to stop us?

We won’t get it from psychiatry, neoliberalism, or the trauma industry, the last of which all too often has similar dynamics to psychiatry: deference towards — and divisive prestige around — powerful, at times charismatic, figures who must not be questioned. At its core, the ultimate message from trauma ‘gurus’ is similar to psychiatry’s, and yet it is effectively run on the gas of prestige and deference: a restrictive philosophy, not least because the science, practices, relationships, and subject positions within the psychiatric system are bogus. The game’s rigged against those who turn to it even before they first step foot through the doors of an institution.

For me, I needed to distance myself from the dominant, suffocating mainstream ‘mental health community’. Even though many within it know something’s up, they’re more likely to turn against dissenting voices, attacking their motives and character, rather than question what they’re actually saying. Many service users of the psychiatric system have been so damaged and persuaded by it that it’s like climbing a mountain to even deal with the flak you can get.

I’d become too familiar with a view of the psychiatric system and its alternatives that was far better for my welfare than the dominant myths to stick around. I’d been here before, but this time I worked to demystify and expose the messages, not only from psychiatry, but also from the wider society: the economy, institutions, groups and individuals. See the world as it is, rather than take it at face value as the one I’d been told to believe in. Better subject positions and ways of being were on offer and I grasped them.

Neoliberalism and psychiatry are in an intimate dance. They sustain and protect each other with shared ideas and interests, while seeking to obscure from us their fundamental flaws. For example, the ‘mental health’ system’s power is propped up on notions of risk that corner politicians, thus compounding its power while it contributes to the very risk it fears. A self-fulfilling prophecy can easily arise from adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs, psychiatry’s distortions of human relationships, its dated practices which demand an obedience that belongs to yesteryear, along with an oppressive narrative that hinders rather than helps. To top it all off, it’s all given an air of credibility via the kind of divisions that neoliberalism thrives on and engineers for its own ends.

In light of this, what it takes is a vision of greater breadth and depth — a demystification that leads to a better outlook for our lives. In popular debates, for example, the trauma industry places a lot of blame on your initial carers — say, your parents — and says you’ve got to apportion blame: again, another rigid set of flat characterisations and limiting subject positions, declared from up on high, down to those below. It’s a vision doomed to failure because it restricts us from appreciating a better approach in the interests of our genuine needs. An approach that translates what you lacked from your initial carers, and why, means you can understand what role historical and social forces had on you and your carers, thus identifying an appropriate answer to your needs along with the path you can tread to meeting them.

The trauma industry’s simple antagonism to initial carers — whether you’ve been through adversity, trauma, or whatever — isn’t the answer. What benefitted me was to have a more humane, comprehensive perspective, where I could critically assess and evaluate myself and the world around me — both private troubles and public issues: an appreciation of the groups I belong to, individuals, social structures, institutions — society itself — from different angles, with a variety of methods. A context worth living by.

Over the course of months, constructing a working evaluation of the pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, and biographies, of myself and those around me, along with an adequate breakdown of the world, meant that merely reacting against it all in a narrow way, with flat characterisations, constrained me. A broader, deeper, more considered approach, seeing that we’re all subject to historical, social and psychological forces offers a picture that’s more rounded and complete. Furthermore, identifying how we feel, and what human needs then arise, offers another view to considering our lives. It’s not only how we can meet these necessities for ourselves, though, but it’s also what we can offer to address those in other people.

It isn’t easy at the outset. Neoliberalism promotes the atomised, competitive individual and family unit, where there’s no such thing as society. As in psychiatry, where there’s no such thing as context, the attraction of such a wider context, incorporating society, brings into view a road to travel with a destination worth heading to.

A psychiatrist once declared to me that I had to abandon these ideas and so turn away from what the education system had taught me to do: question everything. Under psychiatry, you’re encouraged to question nothing. What’s maybe even worse was that another psychiatrist advised me to only read and place my complete trust in the output of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and consult no other source. Yet another example of archaic and anachronistic interactions, reminding me of how I’d initially been taken aback on my very first involvement with the system.

Looking at the methods I’d already developed — that seek to transcend structures like capitalism and psychiatry — with somatic and emotional work, my approach is even more rounded, relational, human and social. No longer the ‘good’, malleable ‘patient’, I know more intimately what works and have set that course in motion.

How I’ve done that is to distance myself from an institution that brought about my own decline and presided over its own failures, especially given that those failures had very little to do with me. Long story, but I reached the conclusion that I needed to end the damaging relationship I’d had with psychiatry, not least because it’s incapable of, and resistant to, enacting the meaningful reforms it so desperately needs.

A test. I had a phone call from my GP on Thursday. He took a dominant, uninformed reading of the situation and forcefully asserted that I should stay with psychiatry, while grossly overreacting and not taking into account anything I said, even dismissively so (at one stage he even tried to intimidate me). He appeared incapable of seeing beyond the diagnostic label and adapting to the situation as it was, rather than how he’d prepared for it. I had the better argument, but he attempted to impose power to the point that I had to remind him that he was not above the law.

Regardless, I asserted my position — though how that’s written up is anyone’s guess — and my 26 year involvement with psychiatry should soon be coming to an end. I emailed my psychiatrist, beginning the process in earnest.

The GP is one more example of how people can be taken in by dominant readings in society, devoid of the knowledge that there’s valid alternatives out there. He demonstrated another instance of a subject constrained by mystifying systems, who acts accordingly, in an oppressive manner. It can happen that easily: I’ve met this GP on another occasion and he struck me as a really pleasant character, showing that these scripts can remove what’s best about many of us.

Beyond that, what constructive steps can I take now? It starts with how things currently are. When something challenging comes up, I now seem equipped to understand it in a way that’s suited to the situation, with methods that seem to work, and a set of actions I can take. I’ve proved to myself, at least, that I can chart a more constructive way forward than what’s been on offer for over two and a half decades.

It looks like I’ve answered most, if not all of the big questions that came up for me when I was first developing CST, though there’s bound to be blind spots, still. If and when they come, it’ll be interesting to see how I work with them. An encouraging sign is that the approach of my GP could have had a similar effect as that of the psychiatric records, but it didn’t. Things had developed.

New information, and ways of seeing are always welcome, and even though I may currently think all the big questions have been settled, they never really are. Over time, I’ve learned that something new can come along at any time which radically alters and clarifies things in a fulfilling way. In the meantime, I have an approach that, so far, has dealt with whatever life conjures up, both challenging and enjoyable, especially now, incorporating somatic and nervous system work into CST.

Having used video and audio to map out a better narrative, a better set of messages, and develop more useful resources, I have now shifted to written work. Being more outward looking than before, I have more detail to work through, and text is more suited to that. Video and audio did a fine job when I was using them and I’ll tap into them again, but for now, the novelty of more structured, detailed work is what I need, and the somatic benefits inherent in using a camera and microphone are always there when I need them, each mode bringing a different language, developing different skills, and having numerous beneficial effects. Using my mind in this structured post, I’ve become so practiced in mind, body and emotions that it’s become natural, whether I’m using my phone to record such moments or not. CST is now doing what I always wanted it to: evolving self-talk into something more thorough and complete.

The ultimate aim of CST isn’t to constantly monitor and police myself in a different way — that would be to repeat the essential mistakes of psychiatry. Rather, it’s to become fluent in a number of languages so as to create a metanarrative that works to free me of the very need for monitoring and policing, and even from the need for the languages themselves. Such multilingualism is always there if I need it — the skills don’t atrophy — but the goal is to keep it all in reserve and continue with a more easy-going, enjoyable, yet purposeful life: a migration to a more hospitable land with a new, more liberating language, forged in the furnace of the old tongues.

As the metanarrative of a life free of neoliberalism and psychiatry’s more damaging limitations is more about living your life with little reference to them (whether negotiating with or opposing them) distancing from them brings more freedom to live a life that can be lived with greater potential for contentedness and fluidity on an ongoing, moment-to-moment basis, rather than any dramatic endpoint. Once a grand narrative conducive to a life well lived is revealed and does its job, it can be put out to pasture for another day, as you no longer need it to be uppermost in your mind while you get on with a life you could have been living all along.

Now that I have a better understanding of what I need, how better to discover what those needs are, demystify what had once been invisible, what better worlds are on offer, and how to work towards them, I can read the psychiatric records again and see them for what they are: little better, and no more worthy of my time, than gossip.

I don’t know a great deal, but I’m resourceful with what I do know. I have to credit myself with that. I can approach myself and my world in more constructive and thoughtful ways, while adopting a beginner’s mind, and thus remain open to revision, fresh information and evolving approaches.

What do I do now? I largely live a life of solitude. My town offers little and I think my time can be better spent not trying to put that right directly. I’ve got my own little corner of the world online that I cultivate now and again whenever it takes my fancy, without letting it take me over, and right now that’s good enough for me.

But this space has been, and continues to be useful. I know myself far better than I did, just as I now know the other people who’ve been significant in my life. We’re in good shape. When I want to, I can identify the essentials in a quite deep way. When things crop up, I know how to deal with them and how to move forward.

If something new comes along that shakes me, I know I can dip into the old languages and find a way out, perhaps with new ones. It’s taken time, but it was time well spent.

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