Order Clover's Autobiography

I am alive! Saying this to myself at the start of each new day fills me with the love and joy of serving others with the possibility of escaping psychiatry alive.

My brothers and sisters were born with common sense, average intelligence and emotions accepting the work ethic as love. Most people are or there could not be even our poor semblance of any society. I was born highly intelligent, creative, sensitive and gentle. My mother busy cooking food, mopping the floor, washing clothes, milking the cows, chopping wood, bathing me, and dressing me did not tell me I was loved. I needed direct showing with “I love you” words and hugging actions. I was a fearful child withdrawing from a loveless world.

 When my capacity to feel became filled with fear, fear was internalized. I became controlled by fear. (In the 1920s, physiologist Walter B. Cannon identified the automatic tipping of the flight or fight survival mechanism). As naturally as withdrawing a hand from a burning stove, I withdrew from a world of people I could not survive in and created my own “autistic” world of animated trees, flowers, and animal friends. Their love providing the strength for a child to walk alone. My brothers and sisters sometimes noted in passing, “You’re crazy in the head.”

My inner resourses exhusted, collopsing from the grief of not being loved, 20 years of age, I was committed to psychiatry.

"Terror acts powerfully upon the body through the medium of the mind and should be employed in the cure of madness. Fear accompanied with pain and the sense of shame has sometimes cured the disease."

Written in 1818 by Benjamin Rush, father of American psychiatry and the first president of the APA, whose face appears on the official seal of the American Psychiatric Association. Rush advocated and practiced terror by designing and using the straitjacket, the tranquilizer chair, and "fear of death.