THE WEST'S DARKEST HOUR

My father and mother have never accepted their responsibility for the trauma they caused me in childhood and adolescence. I don’t think they ever will. They are too proud by far to accept the truth of gross personal error. What my father did and what my mother did not do. As only consolation for what has been a hellish life, I look back with warm reminiscences on that one instance – that tiny spark of hopeful joy – where she did come to my defence in the sharing of truth, sad only that she, in turn was abused by cold professionals on account of their hubris, and arrogance, and industry gaslighting, the fundamental – unfalsifiable – tenets of bio-reductionist psychiatry, a pseudoscience of ignorance and blind dogmatism. I have covered the evils of psychiatry more comprehensively in my other books, though, so I will not repeat myself here.

Beyond all the pain and heartbreak, I still love my parents. When read by them, I hope this book will go some way towards redeveloping our relationship together before their deaths. They raised me as only they could, damaged themselves from their childhoods in 1940s Ireland, where I am aware my father was psychologically brutalised daily by the sadism of his harsh Christian Brothers schoolmasters and further tormented by his emotionally neglectful mother and a crowd of elderly aunts (as my grandfather was often away at sea for long stretches, and fighting in the Second World War), for whom nothing he ever accomplished or achieved academically was ever good enough, and where my mother and her large family lived in constant fear of hunger and deprivation, coupled to a terror of her father, and his endless shouting and rows with her mother, and (I think) some physical violence. The great hurt has been passed down through generations, from parents to children and then to their children. It is understandable, at least. It is a shame I cannot write their own stories yet, as they deserve to be heard.

I wrote this book as official self-therapy, in final resolution, to unlock the repressed sadnesses I have never been able to recount otherwise and to come to terms with myself and with my family, to heal. To know myself again. It has been a painful journey, but I hope some small understanding can be gained from these lines. Mental illness is an expression of family trauma, not brain abnormalities, chemical imbalances, or genetic defects. For this reason, its aetiology is sadly taboo in our society. After all, the Christian commandments to honour our fathers and mothers have long saturated Western thought, shared by parental introjection down many centuries, subconsciously shaping our morality and credulity and inspiring our decision-making. To hold them to account instead is to transgress this unwritten assumption. One can see why the psychiatrists and their industry act as gatekeepers and parental defenders, in cahoots with abusive parents over any genuine healing treatment of their victims. To admit otherwise would destroy the claimed legitimacy of their profession.

However, maybe now more will be inspired by this document to share their home lives, and our society, finally, after more than three hundred years of exposure to this punitive and fallacious pseudomedical torture, will begin in turn to knit together again and recover. It is at least a hope. We all owe ourselves that. In general now, given this main autobiographical account (among an expanding group of others), it has become clear that psychotic patients are not born but made.

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Benjamin’s book can be obtained here.