Feb 25, 2007 03:00 AM

It is now over two months since Helena’s spirit has finally found freedom.  She is free at last.  She was a spirited, intelligent and loving woman, who above all was full of integrity and never could accept that her low self esteem and powerlessness was a ‘mental illness’.  She was tortured over, and over again, by the mental health system, which refused to listen and always treated her and abused her with psychotropic drugs and electroshock.

Over the years her personality changed from a spirited woman to a helpless and hopeless broken repeated record convincing herself she was worthless.  For the last six long years of her life, she spent most of her time locked away in Carrig Mor secure psychiatric hospital in Cork.  I visited her on a regular basis and spent many long hours with Helena. Most of that time she was chemically lobotomised by a nueroleptic called rispiradol.  This was very evident to me, because I spent so much time with Helena and I knew what it was like to be lobotomised myself.  I visited and spoke to her psychiatrists and told them this important truth, even when it was very difficult to arrange these meetings, but none of them would listen and insisted on their treatment over and over again.

I hope Helen’s life will not be in vain but will help to convince the present Mental Health System of the error of it’s ways and how much destruction it is prepared to do in the name of help.  Helena did not receive the help she wanted but instead was forced to receive harm, disguised as help, she did not want.  I know it would be her dying wish that finally depression would be seen and understood as, in her own very important words   “a suffering of the soul which encompasses the mind and the body rendering one helpless and hopeless”

Helena may you finally rest in peace.

 

Your loving friend,

 

Mary.  Xx.