Ranty Thoughtfulness on Harm Reduction, Community Acupuncture and Poetry

One quirk of this job is the Theme Week, or Theme Day. Call it synchronicity if you like. ‘Punks, tell me if this happens at your clinic too: partway through a shift you realise that 4 of the 8 sleepers are all having treatment for pain in the right shoulder. Or, day 1 menstrual cramps. Or, nausea. Or bereavement following the recent passing of their mother (yeah, that happened. Though it was only 3 of 7 sleepers that day.) Last week’s theme, for me, was Pharmaceutical Complications.

One of my favourite things about Poke is our commitment to harm reduction; to meeting and accepting people where they’re at, finding out what they want for themselves and supporting them in getting there. We don’t do diet and lifestyle counseling, nor do we judge.

Psychiatric drugs are complicated. On the one hand, I have deep deep concerns about the symptoms of our entirely human hurts and traumas being numbed masked by drugs. I want for people to have the space to feel and express a spectrum of emotion and experience. But I know people use meds as tools to work through stuff – and, just to show up for their day. It’s not always about catharsis and transformation. Sometimes you gotta get out of bed, feed the kids, and function at work. I get that. I’m comfortable in my position as support person offering acupuncture & safe space at Poke as adjunct to whatever else someone chooses to do for themselves. I’m not the expert on anyone else’s body, nor do I want to be.

It gets sticky for me when the client is visibly conficted.

“I want to go off the medication but my doctor says I have to be on it for the rest of my life.”

“I’m having awful side effects but I can’t get in to see my doctor for a month.”

“I have headaches, not anxiety, but they didn’t believe me, they put me on Ativan and now I feel awful.”

It’s especially tough when someone’s dealing with the everyday reality of a cascade of interventions; the antidepressants which cause insomnia which requires sleeping pills which causes long-term exhaustion which causes, you guessed it, depression…and the WORST is when folks are unwillingly, heavily medicated for PTSD. This drives me utterly batshit, primarily because 1) PTSD IS TREATABLE AND CURABLE, IT JUST TAKES A LOT MORE THAN 10 MINUTES AND A PRESCRIPTION and 2) in my observation, it is especially likely to happen to women, queers, transfolk, people of colour, and poor people.

Let us notice here the percentage of psychiatrists and doctors who are white, cisgendered (non-trans) men.

I know I know I know that some doctors are healers, some of them care deeply, lots of them are burnt out and doing their best within a broken system.

But still, sometimes, as an anarcho-feminist, I want to shatter the sweet stillness of Poke to shout “NOOOOO! STOP TAKING THEIR PILLS! RECLAIM YOUR BOOOODYYYY!!!” I want to grab the damn doctor by the throat and tattoo the Hippocratic Oath across their forehead in reverse so that they’re reminded of it each time they look in the mirror. I want to create a new kind of asylum where people are supported by community while they retreat, wail, pound on walls, have visions and discharge terror without being forcibly silenced by other people’s need to Act Like Nothing’s Wrong And Preserve The Normal At All Costs.

As a levelheaded health care professional I wish that we could treat the damn doctor, (who probably needs acupuncture as much if not more than their patients) I choose my words carefully, mindful that this person’s experience is about them, not me, I fervently do the NADA Acudetox 5-Needle Protocol, and occasionally lend out my copy of the Icarus Project’s Harm Reduction Guide to Coming off Psychiatric Drugs (downloadable here: https://theicarusproject.net/alternative-treatments/harm-reduction-guide-to-coming-off-psychiatric-drugs)

Then I get really ranty with the other ‘punks I’m blessed to work with. (Thaaanks, D & S!)

Last weekend was a surprisingly satisfying bookend to Pharmaceutical Complications week. I featured at a poetry event at the Victoria Anarchist Bookfair, receiving afterwards some of the most meaningful feedback of the last 9 years of writing and performance. Someone told me that they’d cried throughout my set, for the first time in ages, that their medication makes them numb and checked-out: “It’s been months. I thought I’d be a zombie forever.”

What do you know. Poetry is harm reduction, too.

Author: Lisa Baird

Lisa prefers fireflies to fireworks, reverts to bluntness in stressful moments, would happily wear legwarmers year-round, and probably wants to be your friend.