(Prerequisite reading: Sad Joke in Clinical Psychology ; Sad Joke on a Marae (by Apriana Taylor) and Sad Joke in District Court (by Lisa Cherrington) )
SAD JOKE IN A MENTAL HEALTH SETTING
Am I mad or bad or am I both?
Let’s see:
You stole my land.
You stopped me from speaking my language.
You prohibited access to my tohunga.
You broke down my collective and moved to a focus on the individual.
I am disconnected to who I am. Maunga? Awa? Pepeha?
I have no experience of this.
Well here I am. Angry. Mad. Bad. Who the fuck knows?
You medicate me with your pills.
You put me under an Act if I don’t take them.
You prescribe psychiatric assessments and psychological interventions
Claimed to be evidence based, based on Western ideologies
White mans ways.
I have now become a commodity
To sell your drugs and interventions too
To imprison in your concrete walls
I am ordered to stand in White Court establishments
To answer to a Pākehā system
I represent all the health and justice inequities
Created by your ways.
I am sick. Unwell.
I am mad. And bad. All of them.
E kī.
Maybe it is you who is sick? Who is mad? Who is bad? Or all of them.
Post script: I feel as if this poem is a poem my Dad would have written - but if it was Dad - maybe with a few more expletives. He had a few ‘mental health’ hospital admissions in his time. His last one, I remember him ringing to tell me about how he liked to ‘play’ with the doctors assessing him. He would turn their ‘well meaning questions’ around on them and play ‘mind games’ which didn’t do him any favours. But I think, he would have definately asked this question of who was really mad and bad.