The Violence of Being Numb

How the pharmaceutical industry is colonialism’s most elegant weapon — and what lies beneath.

There is a pill for everything now. For the sadness you feel when your life has no meaning. For the agitation you feel when you cannot sit still in a system designed to make you sit still. For the sleeplessness you feel when something in you refuses to go unconscious, refuses to stop registering what is happening, refuses to let you rest inside a life that does not fit.

There is a pill, and the pill works. It does exactly what it says it will do. It quiets the signal. It dampens the alarm. It takes the part of you that was screaming and teaches it, over time, to whisper, and then to stop. Like we do to children: teach them to repress their cries, their intuition, their vitality - to fit it all in what we have capacity for.

What they do not tell you — what the literature buries in the fine print of what they call “side effects” — is that the thing being quieted is not the problem. It is the messenger. It is the part of you that knows everything there is to know.

◆ THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CAGE

Frantz Fanon understood this before the pharmaceutical industry had perfected its tools. Writing from colonial Algeria in the 1950s, he documented how the colonial system produced madness — not as metaphor, but as clinical outcome — and then used the asylum to contain the evidence of its own violence. The colonized person’s psychological suffering was not a malfunction. It was a rational response to an irrational situation. It was sanity, wearing the only face it could.

We have updated the asylum. We have made it portable, daily, biochemical, entirely voluntary.

The conditions that psychiatry now classifies as disorders — ADHD, major depression, generalized anxiety, insomnia, bipolar spectrum — cluster with striking consistency around the conditions of modern Western life: the dissolution of community, the severing from nature and from ancestral knowledge, the loss of ritualised beginnings and endings, the demand for productivity above all else, the replacement of meaning with consumption, the management of children in environments antithetical to how children’s nervous systems were designed to function.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is epidemiology. Depression rates track industrialization. ADHD diagnoses track the elimination of unstructured outdoor play. Anxiety disorders track social isolation and economic precarity. The DSM expands with each edition, and with each expansion, the pharmaceutical market grows to meet it.

◆ DESIGNED FOR LIFE

The phrase is used as a promise: you may need to take this for life. Presented as care. As management of a chronic condition, the way one manages diabetes. Except this one is undetectable, there is no diagnostic tool for it. Dr Sami Tamimi, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist in the NHS in the UK states i. his book Searching for Normal: ‘There is no biological difference that can be used to differentiate people with an ADHD diagnosis from those without it. There are no characteristic genetic, brain or chemical differentiators between those with or without an ADHD diagnosis.’

What is not said is that the business model of those medications hands you a life sentence and that the clinical trials which establish efficacy are funded by the manufacturers. That withdrawal from SSRIs, benzodiazepines, and antipsychotics is frequently more destabilizing than the original condition — a fact systematically understudied and underreported for decades.

Robert Whitaker, in his exhaustively documented Anatomy of an Epidemic, traced the outcomes of psychiatric medication over the long arc of decades and found something disturbing: the explosion of psychiatric drug prescription since the 1980s has not correlated with improved mental health outcomes. It has correlated with an explosion in long-term psychiatric disability. The drugs that were meant to restore function have, for a significant portion of those who take them, gradually diminished it.

You become dependent on the thing that was supposed to free you. And then your dependence becomes the evidence that you needed it all along.

This is not medicine. This is a tightly closed system.

◆ WHEN THEY REALISED WHAT IT ACTUALLY DID

The story of psychedelics and power is, at its core, a story about a miscalculation.

In the early 1950s, the CIA became obsessed with LSD. Not because they feared it — because they wanted it. MKUltra director Sidney Gottlieb arranged for the CIA to purchase the world’s entire supply of LSD and began distributing it — through fake foundations, through hospitals and prisons and clinics — to find out whether it could be used to control the human mind. To erase memory. To manufacture compliance. To produce, in the language of the programme, a robot agent.

They dosed prisoners. They dosed mental patients. They administered the drug to people who could not fight back. They ran brothels in San Francisco where unwitting men were slipped the drug and filmed through one-way glass. They gave it to a man in Kentucky for a hundred and seventy four days straight, testing whether they could break a mind entirely and rebuild it to order.

What they found instead — what kept escaping their control, multiplying beyond their laboratories, spreading through the hands of poets and musicians and ordinary people looking for something they could not name — was that LSD did not make people easier to govern. It made them harder to contain inside the desired narrative. It cracked open the structures through which people had learned to see the world as natural, as given, as the only possible arrangement of things. It dissolved, temporarily and unforgettably, the membrane between the individual and the larger patterns of power operating on them. Among those who found the experience deeply meaningful were Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey — both of whom had first encountered the drug through government-funded experiments — and who went on to become voices of a generation that would not stop asking uncomfortable questions.

The government had wanted a key to lock minds. What they had made, accidentally, was a key that unlocked them.

At the same time, legitimate psychiatric research was producing results that should have transformed medicine. Researchers in the 1950s and early 1960s were documenting remarkable loop outcomes — LSD and other psychedelic compounds were being tested as therapeutic tools, often with government support and promising results, for conditions including alcoholism, depression, and anxiety in the terminally ill. These were not fringe studies. They were clinical. They were careful. They were pointing somewhere important.

By the mid-1970s, the legal exploration of the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs was over.

The official reason was regulation. The thalidomide disaster in the early 1960s had tightened pharmaceutical research protocols, and psychedelics — which resist the neat double-blind structure of conventional drug trials, because the experience itself is the therapy — could not easily be made to fit. But regulation was the mechanism, not the motive. The motive was something rawer and more political than that.

Nixon’s crackdown on psychoactive drugs became part of a broader political reaction against the liberation movements of the 1960s. LSD had become inseparable from the counterculture, from the antiwar movement, from the rising suspicion among young people that the world their governments had built was not the only possible world — and that the version being sold to them was, in fundamental ways, a lie. Nixon called Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America. His aide John Ehrlichman, years later, was more candid about what the war on drugs was actually for. We understood, he said, that we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or Black in the United States — but we could criminalize their common pleasure.

Read that again. Sit with it.

They could not make consciousness illegal. So they made the compounds that expanded it illegal instead. Psilocybin was placed in Schedule I — the same category as heroin — a classification driven by cultural and political factors rather than scientific evidence. Decades of promising research were buried. The therapeutic pathways being mapped by serious clinicians were closed. And in their place came the pharmaceutical industry’s alternative vision: not substances that dissolved the ego and temporarily revealed the machinery of your own conditioning, but substances that smoothed the symptoms of that conditioning well enough that you could keep going. Keep functioning. Keep consuming. Keep believing that the life you had been given was the only life possible.

The psychedelics showed people the cage. The antidepressants made the cage more comfortable.

That is not a metaphor. That is the history.

And this is why the revival of psychedelic research — now gathering momentum again in clinical trials into psilocybin and MDMA, producing results that mainstream psychiatry is finding increasingly difficult to dismiss — feels like more than medicine. It feels like a political act. Because the compounds that power once tried to weaponise, and then tried to eradicate, are doing now what they always did when they escaped the laboratory: they are showing people, briefly and irrevocably, what is true. And some of what is true is that the systems organising their lives were not designed for their flourishing.

They were designed for their compliance.

◆ WHAT GETS NUMBED

Here is what I have seen — in myself, in people I work with, love and play with.

The drugs take the bottom off the pain. They also, quietly, take the top off everything else. The intensity of grief flattens. But so does the intensity of beauty. The urgency of fear quiets. But so does the urgency of desire, of calling, of the voice that says: this is not your life, you were made for something else.

What gets numbed is not just suffering. What gets numbed is perception. The capacity to feel, fully, the wrongness of the situation. The capacity to feel, fully, the rightness of what you actually want. And if you cannot feel the wrongness, you cannot mobilize against it. You adapt. You cope. You manage. You take your medication and you function, and functioning becomes the metric by which you measure whether you are well.

But functioning inside a cage is not wellness. It is compliance.

Intuition lives in the body. It speaks through sensation, through discomfort, through the sudden inexplicable certainty that something is true. The psychiatric drugs that dull sensation do not only dull pain — they dull the body’s entire signaling system, the system through which we know what we know before we can explain why we know it. They dull the part of you that has not yet forgotten what you are. Which is exactly where your capacity to heal lies.

◆ THE OBSTACLE COURSE

Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a terrain to be met.

And it comes for you. It comes with loss and with disappointment and with the particular humiliation of discovering that something you believed about yourself is not true. It comes with grief that has no timeline and fear that has no object and the slow, grinding recognition that certain things you wanted are not going to happen the way you imagined. It comes, and it keeps coming, and the question that determines everything — the question that colonialism, and its pharmaceutical arm, has a profound interest in you never asking — is: can you meet it?

The obstacle course does not care whether you are ready. It does not pause while you build your capacity. It simply presents the next thing, and the next, and the thing after that. And here is what I have come to understand, through my own life and through watching others move through theirs: every obstacle you meet fully — every pain you stay inside long enough to metabolize, every fear you walk toward rather than away from, every grief you let move through you rather than chemically arresting it — builds something. A kind of interior musculature. A capacity. The self that comes through is not the same self that went in. It is more capable, more flexible, more rooted. It knows, because it has tested itself against reality, that it can survive contact with difficulty.

But every obstacle you go around — every discomfort you numb before it can speak, every signal you silence before you have understood what it is signaling — leaves that musculature undeveloped and perpetually weak. You arrive at the next challenge a little less prepared than you should have been. And the one after that, less still.

This is the cruelty of the long-term numbing: it does not protect you from life. It only defers the meeting, while quietly eroding your capacity to show up for it. You do not become more able to handle difficulty. You become less. And so the challenges that your grandparents would have absorbed as ordinary — the friction of relationship, the ache of uncertainty, the normal darkness of a difficult season — begin to feel catastrophic. Because the instrument through which you would have met them has been gradually, gently, chemically tuned down.

You are handed smaller and smaller problems and find yourself less and less equipped to face them. Not because you are weak. Because you have been systematically prevented from becoming strong.

The people I have watched do the hardest work of their lives — sitting with what they have been running from, letting the feeling arrive without managing it, staying in the room with their own experience — do not emerge broken. They emerge altered. There is something in their eyes that was not there before. A settledness. A capacity to be present with difficulty without being destroyed by it, because they have learned, experientially, in the body, that difficulty does not destroy you. That the feeling, however terrible, has an other side. That you are larger than what you are feeling, and you know this now not because someone told you, but because you went there and came back.

That knowledge cannot be given. It cannot be prescribed. It can only be earned, in the living of it.

This is what the numbing steals. Not just the pain — though it steals that too, and the pain was trying to tell you something. It steals the education. The slow, irreplaceable curriculum of a life fully felt. The accumulation of evidence that you can meet what comes. The deep animal confidence of a self that has been tested and has not broken.

They want you manageable. They want you functional. They want you moving through the system without friction, without revolt, without the dangerous clarity that comes from having felt, all the way down, what this life is actually costing you. They want you to live simply to produce and consume. If you do not comply to this you are deemed dysfunctional, disabled, surplus. A burden to be rehabilitated.

◆ THE ANTI-COLONIAL REVOLUTION IS FEELING EVERYTHING

I am not telling you to stop your medication. I want to be precise about what I am saying, because this conversation has been made deliberately difficult to have — framed so that any critique of psychiatric medicine becomes irresponsibility, becomes dangerous, becomes a reason to doubt your credibility.

I am saying: the discomfort is information. The sleeplessness is information. The inability to focus on things that do not matter to you is information. The grief is information. Before you silence it, before you hand it to a system that profits from your silence — ask what it is trying to tell you. Contrary to the popular obsession with escaping the culturally deemed unwanted, it is nothing else but the portal that informs your brain, your heart, your body about how to protect your survival. It is the profoundly intelligent manual that life hands you to stay in this experience intact.

The anti-colonial revolution is not, ultimately, political before it is personal. It begins in the body. It begins in the willingness to look, to feel what you actually feel, to stay with the discomfort long enough for it to begin speak freely through you, to refuse the management of your experience by forces whose interest lies in your continued management.

This is not easy. I would not describe what it asks of you as easy. It is also made more difficult by the collective consent to unlearn its signals. To come through the discomfort to the other side — clearer, more alive, more certain of what you will not accept — requires support. It requires community. It requires the kind of deep witnessing that our wellness industry sometimes provides and sometimes sells a simulation of.

But the path through is always through.

The path through is not around. Not numbed. Not managed into a functioning approximation of a curated life.

The revolution is not comfortable. It was never going to be comfortable. But it is the only path to a self that is genuinely yours — forged in contact with reality, not preserved in amber, not functioning on borrowed numbness, not perpetually deferred from its own becoming.

They have built a system that makes you sick and sells you the cure and calls the cure a life. They moulded the architecture of your perception to consider war necessary. What cell of your human body that is here for life’s sacred journey agrees with intentional murdering of other human beings for the benefit of all? The most radical thing you can do is see it clearly, feel it fully, and decide that is not enough.

Feel it. All of it. The sheer magnitude of the charade to which you have agreed to.

Wake up — not as a slogan, but as a daily, embodied, biochemically unclouded practice. Stay in the room with your own experience. Trust that what you feel, even when what you feel is unbearable, is pointing somewhere real. Those who are aware of this have been considered the ‘outsiders’, the ‘hippies’, the ‘woo-woo’ of our expertly designed matrix. That should tell you something: your belonging is entirely conditional to the rules of a world you did not choose.

Your perception is not a symptom.

Your perception is the whole point.

Your perception is your only light through this darkness.