With(drawing)

With(Drawings) is a project that I have been working on since October 2019 – It chronicles the journey tapering off Psychiatric drugs after being polydrugged with 25 different powerful psychopharmaceutic drugs over a 14-year period, essentially a chemical lobotomy. With(drawings) explores the iatrogenic rupturing of the nervous system because of irresponsibly prescribed coerced psychiatric drugging and reclaiming autonomy from the chains of psychiatry. Through the medium of automatic ink drawing I viscerally explore the struggle of a having a dysregulated nervous system and the disequilibrium of hundreds of physiological symptoms simultaneously. The hypersensitive embodied effect of psychiatric poisoning and being acutely aware of every slight sensation being magnified within the entire organisation, the feeling of not being able to stand still inside my skin the agitation and blood-curdling terror of akathisia, constantly gyrating form one state to another confronting the body as a site of decaying temporality.

Tapering off psychiatric drugs is an act of unmasking from the subdued masked state of mental clouding and becoming unashamed of distress, unusual behaviour and embracing what was previous pathologised as ‘intensity and excess.’ It is an act of mad liberation, demedicalisation of distress and becoming open and willing to create new meanings of my experiences. With(drawings) resists the assimilative masquerade of ‘wellness’ and refuses to embody societal ills and the inability to reiterate the socially constructed order as an individualised disorder.

With(Drawings) visually actualises experiences of psychiatric imposed neurotoxicity, sheer terror, the sound of a thousand voices screeching and screaming, electrical jolts in the brain, the terrifying sensation of feeling all 10 billion nerve endings all at once, heart pounding cortisol spikes, adrenal surges, relentless vicious thoughts, petrifying tachycardia and hypnogogic hallucinations being dragged down by shadowy black masses.

With(Drawings) is a narrative of survival, unmasking, resilience, fighting for authenticity, speaking up in a world that seeks to silence deems divergence and madness a pathology and inconvenience.