Yeah, Right

The other night I watched You're Gonna Miss Me, a documentary about Roky (pronounced Rocky) Erikson. Roky Erickson was a singer/musician who went crazy. Or was always crazy. Or perhaps crazy isn't a nice word. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic.

The documentary shares how he went from being a pretty up and coming dude in the late 60s to a dishevelled older man living in section-8 housing in Austin having no contact with anybody other than his (rather freakin' odd herself) mother. Then his youngest (of 5) brothers...an incredibly new agey tuba player...intervenes, insists on his brother getting medicated and moved up to Pittsburgh (where the dude plays in the orchestra).

Anyways. It's an interesting movie. Even if you never really have a sense of Roky's personality past being, well, pretty darn odd.

But here's the real thing, my point/thought:

There's a 5 years later subscript. In which there's footage of a trial of guardianship where everybody's talking about how Roky's doing so much better...he's performing...he's been off his meds for three months and that he should have legal custody over himself. Along with the trial footage there's this strange conversation between the brother (Sumner) and some new agey pyschologist type....in which they go on at length about how mental illness DOES NOT EXIST. And how Roky was all thinking he was an alien, hearing voices, etc simply because he wasn't taking care of his body. So, in that subscript, Roky gets custody of himself. But he's all twitchy in the video, constantly licking his lips and wringing his hands and generally looking like there's stuff goin' on in his head that isn't so sane.

This makes me rather incensed. Even the judge was like 'well, Roky, you seem to be doin' pretty good and it's awesome that you've stopped taking your anti-psychotic medication...but if you start gettin' all crazy again you should really start taking it again'....but, my understanding anyways, people who need to take anti-psychotic drugs hardly ever want to start taking them once they're in the throes of an episode.

And the newagey bullshit. The 'there's no such thing as mental illness' mindset. They might as well be scientologists.