2014 Introduction

The greatest happiness comes in expressing what you are.
Alfred North Whitehead 

Welcome. My name is Hazel Gay.
Here you will find my book,  To Heal the Broken-Hearted, 
a chronicle of my perilous 18 year journey through hell and back with what is called “mental illness” in our society, and contrary to what our society teaches, a journey of healing, becoming whole and transformation. Of the last twenty-three years, twenty have been spent in the profession for which I trained at the graduate level before all hell broke loose – teaching the deaf. Thirteen years were at the residential school for the deaf in Little Rock, Arkansas. When I retired at age 65, I went back to Oklahoma where I commuted over a hundred miles a day for seven years to interpret, tutor and provide speech therapy to a deaf student attending public school. I remained alone.


Something a Mayflower captain said in reference to Columbus might sum up my experience during those years from 1971 to 1989:

     “He didn’t know where he was going,
     he didn’t know where he was when he got there,
     and he didn’t know where he’d been when he got back.”  


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The pragmatist can recognize what works. It’s time for my story to be told.                                                                                 

               
 The radical decision to research my mind was made after the third person in my immediate family of four was diagnosed schizophrenic in 1976. I knew somebody had to do something to save my four children and grandchildren from the traumatic diagnosis of “mental illness.”



 From my synopsis:

       Since I’ve never been one to wait around for someone else to do everything, or to give me permission, I followed in my father’s footsteps and volunteered. Besides, I was that kid in second grade who wanted to find out if the teachers knew what they were talking about during a partial solar eclipse when they said, “Don’t look without the smoked glass, it’ll make you blind.” I looked, I saw, it didn’t make me blind.
      So prompted by the extremely inadequate, dehumanizing and at times life threatening experiences with most of the mental health system, the consistent failure of psychiatry to deal with, or even acknowledge the spiritual aspects of my psyche and what was becoming an outbreak of schizophrenia in my family, I dared to confront the core of my “mental illness” ALONE and dared to challenge orthodox psychiatry. I now have the story of an 18 year period of my life, from 1971 to 1989, 13 years of which were spent in my personal version of research of my mind. Purely an independent research, it was conducted in the ultimate natural setting, without benefit of funding, facilities or camaraderie.

WITH ONLY THE POLESTAR OF MY INSTINCT AND AN UNKNOWN INNER NAVIGATOR, I DESCRIBED THE PROCESS BY WHICH I WAS BROUGHT TO A FULLY FUNCTIONING EMOTIONAL PSYCHIC LIFE.
I had discovered that a perhaps critical childhoold developmental stage had been interrupted causing me to be an incomplete person. With the loss of control over my ego and normal concious state, room was made for me to complete my childhood.

My mother had developed epilepsy at the age of 39 from a previous temporal lobe brain injury and developed a psychosis six years later that was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia.
             

PSYCHIATRISTS NO LONGER DIAGNOSE THE PSYCHOSIS AS SCHIZOPHRENIA WHEN THE PERSON HAS EPILEPSY.


My sister followed traditional literature describing mystical or spiritual experience.

        Without investigating the background of the individuals involved, the psychiatric profession just knew my family had hereditary “mental illness” or “schizophrenia.” Through my persistence I blew that theory into the next galaxy. By collecting data on relatives that had been diagnosed with “mental illness,” including information from death certificates, I discovered varying biological etiologies. Then by following my journey to its culmination and clarifying the lack of a hereditary foundation for my diagnoses, I freed my descendants from a life haunted with the ominous, negative weight of a scarlet label of hereditary mental illness.

The current biomedical model of “mental illness” is based on what is becoming an archaic belief of the human body as a machine.